YANK Stories

Picnic at Sansapor

2009-08-28T19:22:00.000-07:00

Picnic at Sansapor

By Sgt. Charles Pearson

YANK Staff Correspondent

Sansapor, Netherlands New Guinea [By Cable]

If there had been some ice cream around, the invasion of Cape Sansapor would have been a picnic. It was a surprise landing. Instead of warships plastering the beach to clear the way for the invasion craft, the LCVPs chugged in unescorted, hoping there would be no one ashore besides the usual hermit crabs.

The infantrymen poured out on the beach and nothing happened. Noone shot at them and no one ran away from them. There just wasn't anyone there. Wave after wave came in and disappeared in the jungle. LCIs and troops proceeded up the beach. It was Sunday morning with the sun shining and no shot fired. A soldier wiped the sweat off his face and said: “Well, why don't we choose up sides?”

Two and a half miles offshore was Amsterdam Island and two miles farther out, Middleburg Island. A company in buffaloes went to Amsterdam and a platoon occupied Middleburg. There were no Japs on either island.

Back on the beach, GIs speculated on the whereabouts of the next landing, gambled with guilders and discussed women. A photographer walked by.

Up on the left flank, a machine gun opened fire suddenly, followed by a few bursts of rifles and tommy guns. There was no answering Jap fire at all. "Someone saw a rabbit," a soldier said by way of explanation.

Two young natives came up the beach and were chased into the water by a small barking puppy. Some ducks and trucks were using the beach for a highway. Five photographers stroIled past.

A small force moving up the right flank to the river passed through a native village, and 10 minutes later all the natives were smoking American cigarettes.

Back at the landing point a whole platoon of photographers went by. There wasn’t much of a battle but it was getting a lot of attention. Cats and bulldozers were building roads and clearing the ground. Ack-ack guns were in position. A small fellow went past with a large white sign lettered in blue: To Latrine. The beachhead was civilized now.

Next morning a force left Sansapor beach in LCMs and headed up the coast to a small settlement, evidently used by the Japs as a barge-relay station. The landing was made a mile and a half to the left of the village. Like the first landing, there were no shots fired. Part of the infantry started for the jungle trail and the rest headed up the beach.

There's a peculiar thing about infantrymen. Whenever they march in, there's always some madman at the head of the column with a seven-foot stride, and everyone in the second half of the column puffs and sweats. It was like that here. As the force approached the village it slowed down and advanced cautiously. The precaution was unnecessary since a rooster, a hen and a pig in the village offered no resistance. The rooster was killed, the hen was captured, and the pig escaped.

We found the village clean and in good order. The Japs who had been living there had scrubbed out the place before leaving. They left practically nothing of value or interest behind. The huts were set in around coconut palms and some banana, breadfruit, kapok and lemon trees. Flowers, red hibiscus and frangipani were everywhere, and it was the kind of place some bum who had never been there would describe as a tropical paradise. The heat was stifling.

There had been no air attacks thus far, and there was little likelihood that the Japs, who had been in the place and taken a powder, would return. All in all it was a cheap victory. No one was sorry about that.

This was not the first action for the troops who took Cape Sansapor. They had fought in earlier New Guinea battles where the going was really tough. The surprise landing probably was more of a surprise to these infantrymen than to anyone else.

The operation will never be made into a movie starring Dorothy Lamour. It undoubtedly will not make everyone forget about a second front. But it does bring us 200 miles closer to the Philippines and the Japanese jackpot. At the moment that's the general idea behind all our movements in this theater.

It's Hotter'n Hell at Andimeshk

2009-08-28T18:33:00.000-07:00

It’s Hotter’n Hell at Andimeshk

By Sgt. Burtt Evans

YANK Staff Correspondent

Desert District, Iran—A GI died at Andimeshk post here and went to hell. "Where were you last stationed?"

asked the Devil.

"Andimeshk," replied the GI.

“Oh," said the Devil sympathetically. “In that case you'd better rush over to the supply sergeant and draw your woolen underwear and winter overcoat."

They don't publish the temperature at Andimeshk, but estimates of the summer heat range from 130 to 180 degrees, with most of the soldier vote favoring the higher figure. Worst thing is that it's almost that hot at night, making it hard to sleep. An old-time GI resident of this desert hot box will pour a canteen of water onto his mattress, then lie down in it and try to get to sleep before the water evaporates.

KPs fhave four meals a day to deal with at Andimeshk — the usual three, plus cold fruit juices and snacks at 0930. This breaks up the work day, which runs from 0530 to 1300 for most of the men; it's murder to work in the afternoon.

Metal subjected to this red-hot sun has caused many a flesh burn. Your dog tags will sear your chest in the short walk from barracks to mess hall. Yet the men here do heavy work, packing supplies for Russia. Most of them, like T/Sgt. Joseph E. Dionne, S/Sgt. Milton Kaplan, T-4 Peter Farkas, T-4 Edward A. Marusa, Cpl. Edward G. Rice and Pfc. Carl C. Miller, are spending their second summer here.

The occasional breeze hits you like a blast from a steel furnace, and the heat plays strange tricks. Some types of soap just melt away, vaseline turns to liquid and shaving-cream crumbles.

Andimeshk is practically in the suburbs of Dizful, "the City of the Blind," hottest inhabited spot on earth. Dizful is one Believe-It-or-Not place that lives up to its billing.

To avoid the heat, the people of this ancient city long ago went underground. All the mysterious functions of a Persian city are performed in a labyrinth of caves many feet below the earth's surface. The wealthier the people are, the deeper they can afford to dig, and there is a saying in Dizful that "the robes of the rich rest on Noah's waters." Many of the inhabitants never come up into the daylight. More than half are at least partially blind—some because of disease, some because of their long stay below the earth.

Other Army posts in the Persian desert are almost as hot as Andimeshk. As one GI put it: “To my mind, when it gets over l50 degrees it doesn't make much difference.”

And nature kicks up other annoyances form these camps. Ahwaz has almost daily duststorms and the American soldiers who unload supply ships at the important port of Khorramshahr often labor through sandstorms that blot out the sun. At Bandur Shapur it's the humidity and stench that get you.

The summer heat is even too much for the flies. When the troops first hit this waste area "the natives greeted them with these heartening words: “InJuly the flies die; in August Johnny dies." But thanks to sun helmets, salt tablets and numerous heat-stroke centers, the medics have kept heat casualties at a minimum.

Andimeshk must be unique in one respect. It is probably the only place in the world where the American soldier is denied his one inalienable privilege—the right to sweat it out.

At Andimeshk perspiration dries as it leaves the pores—you can't sweat,

YANK 25 Aug 1944

The Battle of Belvedere

2009-08-27T15:50:00.000-07:00

The Battle of Belvedere

In this Tuscany town, a battalion of Storm Troopers found it was no match for the Fifth Army's crack Japanese-American soldiers.

By Sgt. JAMES P. O'NEILL

YANK Staff Correspondent

With the Fifth Army in Italy—There are three outfits that will remember the little Tuscany town of Belvedere for a long while to come. Two of them are the American 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442d Combat Team, now spearheading the drive to the north. The other is a German SS battalion, the remnants of which are now spearheading a drive toward Naples and the nearest PW camp.

Both the 100th Battalion and the 442d Combat Team are composed of Japanese-Americans, many of them from Hawaii. The 442d is a recent arrival in Italy, but the 100th has been here a long, long time. The men of the 100th went in at Salerno and have since fought through almost every major action from the Volturno to Rome. In a battalion of 1,300 men they have more than 1,000 Purple Hearts.

The story of Belvedere really began after Rome fell, when the 100th was pulled out of the line and sent to bivouac in the pleasant countryside just north of the city. There it joined the 442d. It was a happy day for both outfits; most of the lOOth's younger brothers, cousins and friends were in the 442d and they hadn't seen each other since shortly after Pearl Harbor, when the 100th left- Hawaii for combat training in the U. S.

For three, days the brass hats left the two outfits alone. The kids of the 442d plied their older brothers with questions of war. The older brothers, like all combat men, dodged these questions and asked questions of their own about Hawaii and their families and girls. Together the outfits visited Rome, buying souvenirs and baffling the Romans, who decided they must be Japanese prisoners. It was impossible for them to believe that these were tough, loyal Americans.

After the three days the two outfits went to work. Now the men of the 100th began to answer those questions; for 14 days they drilled the 442d, sweating with the kids from morning to night, cursing and pushing and ridiculing and encouraging them, giving the final polish that makes a man as much of a combat soldier as he can be before combat. And in the evenings they would sit around together and drink “vino” and sing their soft Hawaiian songs.

Then on the seventeenth day after the fall of Rome the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442d Combat Team were pulled into the line, and two days later they headed for the beautiful little hilltop town of Belvedere.

The 100th was the first to go into the line. Its objective was a small town about seven miles below Belvedere. The German strategy since Rome had been to fight in pockets on each sector of the front, and the mission of the 100th was to clean up one of these rear-guard pockets. The men of the 100th did it in two days, chasing the Germans up the inland road toward Florence and meeting little resistance until they neared the valley directly before Belvedere. There they were stopped by a brace of 150-mm cannon and several self-propelled guns. The German artillery was also holding up a battalion to the right of the 100th. This battalion was trying to use a crossroad, but the Germans had it zeroed in. Division sent orders for the 100th to stop while division artillery tried to clear out the Germans. When the barrage was over, the 100th was pulled out and the 442d was sent in lb assault the German positions.

It didn't work. The 442d made an initial break-through, but that was all. The Germans counter-attacked against the 442d's left flank, throwing in a mess of mortars. They pushed the 442d out of the valley and pinned the outfit down in an exposed and highly uncomfortable position in a wheatfield. Meanwhile the German artillery had moved back and was still stopping the battalion on the right of the 442d.

Back in their bivouac areas the men of the 100th heard what was happening to the 442d and began to get itchy. The enlisted men unconsciously began to clean and oil their guns; the officers brought out their maps and began to think. Finally they held a semiofficial meeting and delegated Capt. Sakae Takahashi of B Company to go to the brass hats and tell them the outfit wanted to do something. When the captain got to the colonel and started to speak, he was cut short. "Save your breath,” the colonel said. "We're hitting the road."

The 100th had orders and a mission.

The mission was simple. All the battalion had to do was to infiltrate the German positions in the valley, the hill that Belvedere was on and the town itself; to encircle and capture the town, and cut off the main road out of Belvedere that runs north to Sasseta and Florence. That was all. Division intelligence said the position was being held by an SS battalion, which had an OP in the town directing artillery and mortar fire on the 442d and the battalion on its right.

A and B Companies of the 100th were assigned to assault positions, with the rest of the battalion in reserve. The jump-off was at 1200 hours. By 1300 both companies had infiltrated completely around Belvedere and were behind the town at a farm called Po Pino. The rest of the battalion dug in among the olive groves at the edge of the valley. B Company was to initiate the attack, while A Company was to rendezvous at Po Pino.

Commanding B Company was the same Capt. Takahashi who had taken the battalion's plea to the colonel. He planned the attack this way: the 1st Platoon under S/Sgt. Yeki Kobashagawa was to take the town; the 2d Platoon under Lt. James Boodry, a former Regular Army dogface from Boston, was to move on the main road leading out of town and cut it off; the 3d Platoon under Lt. Walter Johnston of New York was to cover the northern position of the company. The heavy-weapons platoon was to move with the 2d Platoon and cover the road north to Sasseta.

Sgt. Kobashagawa broke his 1st Platoon into three squads, two of which encircled Belvedere on each side, while the sergeant led his squad into town. On the outskirts Kobashagawa's squad located the Jerry OP wires, which were cut by one of the point men, Pfc. Seikichi Nakayama. Then the squad moved cautiously into town. It was quiet, the men were almost up to the modern three-story Fascist headquarters when two German machine pistols opened up on them. They ducked behind some houses and settled down to work.

Kobashagawa and two men, loaded with grenades, moved toward the big building under cover of the others. The machine pistols were located in a doctor's office on the first floor. One of the men was hit, but the sergeant and the other man got to the house next door. They tossed four grenades in the window, and the machine pistols were through. Four Germans came out of the building, and the covering fire killed three and wounded one.

That left about 20 Germans in the building. They started to retreat the back way and out of town toward the valley. They fought from house to house, and; then ducked over a ravine and down into the valley. The two squads encircling the town caught some of these Germans coming out of the ravine.

When Kobashagawa's platoon assembled again at the edge of town, it ran into machine-gun fire from a German half-track located in front of one of the valley farmhouses. The platoon could also hear the noise of a battle opening up to the right.

Kobashagawa decided to dig in and call for mortar support before jumping the farmhouse.

The mortar support didn't come. The heavy weapons platoon had discovered a nice reverse slope and set up there to cover the road to Sasseta. The platoon was about to open up on some Germans trying to make a get-away when the point squad of the 2d Platoon, preceding the weapons platoon, arrived at the edge of the hill and practically ran into the four German 155s that had been firing on the 442d and its flank battalion. The Germans had just moved into this new position and were preparing to fire.

They never did. Lt. Boodry, commanding the platoon, had Cpl. Hidenobu Hiyane, communications man, get the weapons platoon on the radio. Cpl. Hiyane contacted T/Sgt. M. Nakahara and gave him the essential data; Their conversation must have sounded terrifying if any Germans were listening—it was conducted in a personal code, combining Hawaiian dialect with Japanese and American slang.

The plan worked all right. While Lt. Boodry and his platoon moved in on the German battery with carbines and M1s, the weapons platoon cut loose with its mortars. In five minutes 18 Germans had been killed and all four of the 155s were out of action.

The Germans knew they were encircled now and tried to make a break up the main road toward Sasseta. Capt. Takahashi ordered the 3d Platoon to move up and cover the flank of the 2d Platoon. He told both rifle platoons and the weapons platoon to hold their fire until the Germans made a break, which sooner or later they had to do. And they did.

Seventeen of their amphibious jeeps loaded with Jerries swung out of an olive grove and headed hell-bent for Sasseta. The three platoons let them get onto the road and then let them have it. All 17 jeeps were knocked out. Two light machine guns manned by Sgt. K. Yoshimoto and Sgt. Nakahara accounted for most of the damage, and the riflemen picked off the Germans as they ran from the jeeps.

Right after that, four German trucks filled with men broke from the olive grove and tried to swing around the knocked-out jeeps. The first two made it, but the other two were stopped. Lt. Boodry picked out one driver with his carbine, and one of his riflemen got the other. The trucks piled up in the middle of the road, blocking it effectively and preventing any further German escape. “The next half-hour," says Pvt. Henry (Slim) Nakamora, a bazookaman of the 2d Platoon, "that valley was like a big box of chocolates and us not knowing which piece to take first."

The test of the Germans retreated to the grove and dug in. Sgt. Kobashagawa's platoon on top of the hill picked off a few of them. The sergeant was good and sore about not getting his mortar support and kept calling for it, but the mortars were needed somewhere else. Capt. Takahashi had decided to make a frontal attack on the farmhouse with the 3d Platoon. The 1st Platoon was assigned to keep the Germans busy in the grove, while the 2d Platoon was to knock off any snipers who might have come up the road on the platoon's flank. The captain also sent a request back to battalion for more ammo. The supply was running low.

When the Germans in the farmhouse saw the 3d Platoon moving toward them, they opened fire. The 3d returned the fire, aided by elements of the 1st and 2d Platoons, and moved in and around the farmhouse. There was a German half-track there, with two Germans working its machine gun. Cpl. Toshio Mizuzawa, who had plopped a rifle grenade into the back seat of a jeep earlier in the day, scored another basket when he dropped one into the half-track and rendered it highly ineffective.

This was enough for the occupants off the farmhouse. They came out with their hands up. One of the prisoners spoke English and asked Lt. Johnston about his platoon: These men are Mongolians, yes?”

"Mongolians hell," the lieutenant said, “Hasn't Hitler told you? These are Japanese. Japan has surrendered and is fighting on our side now." The German was a little skeptical until three of the dogfaces gathered around and solemnly intoned: Tojo no good. Hitler no good. Roosevelt good. Banzai!" That convinced him.

Sgt. Kobashagawa had seen the Germans reforming in the olive grove and had spotted a PzKW IV tank there. He relayed this information to Capt.Takahashi, who didn't exactly relish the idea of running into a tank with so little ammo. The captain sent an urgent call for A Company and ordered the 3d Platoon back to the reverse slope to join the weapons platoon, leaving a patrol to scout the area. The patrol consisted of Sgt. A. Governagaji and Pfc. Tanreyshi Nakana, working as a BAR team, and Pvt. Nakamora with his bazooka. Snipers tried to get them but were silenced by Lt. Boodry and a squad from his platoon. Boodry shot one sniper out of a tree from 150 yards with his carbine. “He fell out of a tree and just looked at me as if he was surprised,” Boodry says. "I was surprised, too. I didn't think a carbine was accurate at that distance. I moved in a little closer and hit him four more times."

Then the German counterattack started. The tank rolled out of the olive grove and started up the slope. It was followed by a half-track, and behind that were some soldiers with two light machine guns and what was left of a rifle company. Sgt. Governagaji of the patrol crawled over to Pvt. Nakamora and asked him if he wanted to take a crack at the tank with his
bazooka.

"Yeah,” said Pvt. Nakamora, who is a man of few words.

Sgt. Governagaji nodded and started to crawl back to his position. On the way he was hit by a slug from the tank. Then the tank bounced into view about 15 yards from Nakamora. He aimed, fired and hit the tank right in the belly. He reloaded and hit it in the same place. The tank moved about 10 yards and blew up. The concussion knocked out Nakamora and killed Sgt.Governagaji who was lying about 10 feet away. Two Germans started out of the tank but Pfc. Nakana, working the BAR alone, got both of them before they were halfway out of the turret.

The weapons platoon on the slope took care of the half-track knocking off its tread. The 2d Platoon had run out of ammunition and withdrawn; the weapons platoon had one box of machine-gun ammo left. Now the German rifle company with the two machine guns started up the hill. The dogfaces didn't know what they were going to do, but they hadn't counted on Nakana with his BAR. Nakana waited until the Germans were within 50 yards, then knocked out the four Jerries carrying the two machine guns. The rest of the rifle company hightailed it back to the olive grove. The counterattack was over.

After that the 100th mopped up. B Company called it a day; A Company moved through and chased the retreating Germans among the olive groves and up and down the ravines. When B Company took stock they found they had one box of ammo left in the company. It was now 1600 hours.

In the valley of Belvedere lay 84 dead Germans; headed for the rear were 32 prisoners and 29 wounded Jerries. By 1900 hours A Company had accounted for 26 more German dead, 18 prisoners and 9 wounded. The box score on Jerry equipment was 13 motorcycles, 19 jeeps, 7 trucks, 2 half-tracks, 1 PzKW IV tank, 1 SP gun, 2 antitank guns, 4 155-mms, 1 radio CP and 1 battalion CP with 20 telephones.

The 100th lost one man and had eight wounded. The next morning the outfit was relieved. It bivouacked that day with the 442d. There was a lot of razzing between the two outfits.

After a couple of days both of them went back into the line.

Taking off with the Tanks

2009-08-25T14:25:00.000-07:00

Taking off with the TANKS

By Sgt. Walter Peters

YANK Staff Correspondent

With the Second Armored Division in France—It was the morning of the beginning of the biggest drive since the Allies had invaded the shores of Normandy. The immediate objective of Combat Command "A," the outfit I was travelling with, was to advance through St. Gilles, thence through Canisy, and finally to capture and hold the heights just before Le Mesnil Herman. Nobody dreamed that our tanks would be sweeping across Brittany and right to the threshold of Brest ten days later.

Four of us were sitting in the half-track that served as command post for the battalion commanded by Lt. Col. Amzi R. Quillian. Along with others in the battalion, the men had made an all-night trek from a bivouac area far to the rear up to a position just before the jump-off line on the St. Lo-Periers Road. The men's faces were brown with dust. Their eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. Dirt clung heavily from their eyebrows and eyelashes.

One of the men looked at his watch. “Ten-forty,” he drawled. The drive had begun at 0900 hours. Our medium and light tanks, led by Col. Quillian, were far to the front and the men in the Combat Command half-track waited for word.

Then the word came over the radio. The colonel's voice was calm and serious. “We've made contact with the enemy and have taken a few prisoners,” he reported.

"You’ve waited a long time,” another voice replied. "Get in there. Get punching. Get hitting…”

“That's the general, all right," said Pfc. Jack Giels, of Cleveland. "He's a bug on slogans."

"We're moving ahead," another voice said over the air. Our long column of trains, that included jeeps, supply vehicles, and ambulances, in addition to half-tracks, began to wobble through a break in the hedges and over the orchard paths that had been cut by the tanks up ahead.

We were cutting right through enemy lines. On either side of us were reserve tanks with infantrymen of the Fourth Division riding atop them. There were also other infantrymen riding in trucks driven by Negro soldiers of a quartermaster truck battalion. To the front, the tanks charged through the hedges, spraying them with machinegun fire as they did so. When the tanks came to enemy pockets that held them up, the infantrymen would jump off and mop up.

The command-post radio was busy with conversation.

“I am held up at a sunken road, 50 yards south of phase-line orange," Col Quillian reported. The whole column stopped.

The colonel continued talking. "Doing everything I can to get across. Using bulldozers."

"Fine, fine," another voice, obviously belonging to the general, replied. "You can have anything I've got. Let's get slugging into them."

While the column was stopped, a mortar platoon sergeant came to the half-track and asked if anybody had an extra helmet. A sniper's bullet had gone right through the top of his and made it unserviceable.

"Maybe the medics have one," Giels said. The sergeant walked back to a medic half-track to see.

The tanks got over the sunken road and we moved on again. For over a mile the terrain resembled farmland that had just been plowed. Everywhere the earth was shaken and blasted by the heavy artillery that had been hurling shells on to it early that morning. There were huge craters in the earth, too, from the bombs that our planes had dropped the day before. There also were burning German tanks that had been destroyed by the tanks ahead of us.

"It would cost Hollywood a cool ten million dollars to shoot a scene like this,” one of the soldiers said. The whole area was trembling from the fire of our artillery. Overhead, the sky was full of "grasshoppers," directing shell fire from the sky. Lying all over the orchards and the roads between them were dead cows and horses—-so many that you no longer paid much attention to them. At one point there were about 25 young pigs running back and forth in fright, and as they ran they squealed. A soldier jumped out of a jeep and took one of them in his arms.

“You'll be okay, little piggy," the soldier said stroking the pig's back. “You'll be all right. It's just those goddam Heinie swine we're after."

One of the men picked up a German song book.

"This is a song of the Panzers," he said. "It says here that when this war is over and the Germans all get back to their Fatherland they're going to raise their children to be Panzers like their daddies."

At about 1500 hours we got on the north road leading to St. Gilles. Then our column was halted again. The enemy was lobbing mortars and 75 and 88 shells into the road. Twenty-five yards behind us a half-track belonging to a heavy-weapons platoon was hit and three men in it were killed. A couple of others were wounded.

In a field to our right were a number of M-10s. Mortar shells were falling all around and as they did so, the men with the M-10s buried their faces in the earth. One of the shells landed directly on a trailer attached to an M-10. Huge flames began to spout from the vehicle. Then the crew of the M-10 ran toward the trailer and began to unload it.

"There's ammunition in that trailer,” a man in a jeep behind us yelled. The crew continued to unload. The fire was beyond control and the rear of the M-10 started to burn. Just then, one of the men took a fire extinguisher and doused another man who ran through the blaze and disconnected the trailer from the M-10 and then a third man drove the M-10 away to safety. Suddenly there was a terrific explosion and the ammunition began to explode.

A medic jeep drove by and the man behind the wheel jumped out and ran toward the trailer. There was another explosion and I didn't see the medic again. About two minutes later I learned that he had been blown up by the explosion—both legs blown off and his body hurled on to the M-10. The man who had run through the blaze to disconnect the trailer, I heard, was Sgt. Thomas Green, of Tennessee. There was too much excitement to get more details.

The column got rolling along the road to St. Gilles. About 300 yards along it, we were forced to stop again. Enemy mortars were still firing at us from somewhere ahead. Everyone took cover alongside the roads as best as he could. Then the fire subsided and we got back into our vehicles and went forward again. We came upon three men walking toward us. One of them was wounded and another was crying. He had lost his buddy only a few minutes before. His body was shaking and he was being helped along by the wounded man and the other soldier, who appeared to be quite all right.

When our column stopped again, a sergeant walked over to a lieutenant and said, “I think we lost ______ ______.

The lieutenant called over First/Sgt. William Trinen, of Letcher, S.D.

I I'd like you to go over and make sure if that body belongs to _____ _____."

“Yes, sir," the first sergeant said.

A few minutes later our half-track pulled into an orchard and the men stretched out in the grass to get some rest. After a time Sgt. Trinen came back. His face was serious. He didn't say a word for a few seconds. Then he looked at Giels and T/Sgt. Russel E. Sands, of Warren, Minn.

“His scalp was ripped wide open,” he said slowly. "He didn't have a chance."

There was a long pause. None of the men said anything.

Sgt. Trinen continued: “He wasn’t even 20 and didn’t give a damn about anything. He was such a clean-cut kid, too.”

Again there was silence for a moment.

"There ain't any of them boys bad when they're dead," Sgt. Sands said.

Giels looked up. "No, nobody's got a bad heart when they're dead."

Word came to us that the most advanced tanks were already passing through St. Gilles. I hitch-hiked a ride in an ambulance half-track that was going there to pick up some wounded. The road was jammed with our tanks that were rolling into the town. The dust was so thick that it was impossible to see more than 20 feet ahead. The infantrymen on the tanks held their hands
over their eyes to keep out the dust. The hot sun beat down on their backs and their clothing was damp from sweat. The gullies beside the road were filled with burning, smoking German tanks and vehicles.

The town itself was like the inside of a furnace. Everything that wasn't stone was on fire and the smoke choked our throats while the heat made it almost unbearable to go ahead. When we reached the other end of the town the ambulance I was riding in stopped. Lying beside the road were three Americans who appeared to be dead. A fourth soldier, though wounded himself, was giving water from his canteen to a fifth man, whose right heel had been squarely cut off by shell fragments and whose chest and face were also bleeding.

Cpl. 1 Carl Lindberry, of Chicago, a surgical technician on the ambulance half-track, felt the pulse of one of the unconscious men.

"There's still a slight beat in him," Lindberry said. "Let's take him in first."

Pfc. Willis Wacker, of Denmoss, N.D., and Pvt. Robert Jee, of Danville, Va., both first-aid men, unfolded a blanket over a stretcher and then placed the man on it. After the wounded man had been placed in the ambulance, Lindberry walked over to another of the unconscious soldiers. He felt one man's pulse and shook his head.

He walked over to the third unconscious soldier, who was lying on his back with his mouth wide open. The man's teeth protruded and the color of his skin was that of death. A little dog was lying beside this soldier, a little dog with a deep cut across his head and his bowels splattered all over himself and on the dirt around him. Lindberry felt the man's pulse. Still a chance," he said.

Next, the man with the cut heel was lifted into the ambulance, and then the soldier who had given him water walked unaided into the cabin off the ambulance.

I got back to the Command Post just as word came over the radio from the forward tankers that there was only enough gas left for a three-hour operation.

“Keep on slugging," the general's voice said.

They did, and at about 2200 hours, Col. Quillian's battalion reached its objective.

YANK 20 Aug 1944 British Edition

Global Outlook

2009-08-20T17:30:00.001-07:00

Global Outlook

By Sgt. Samuel W. Taylor

Aside from technological advances, one of the greatest benefits of this war is the broadening influence on the men. The GIs will return from the far corners of the world with a cosmopolitan outlook—deepened, mellowed by experience in foreign lands. No man will ever be quite the same after a visit to the ETO. Not after mild and bitter.

The broadening influences can be seen in any chance encounter between a couple of world-weary GIs.

“Yeah, I was in the South Pacific a year," the sergeant says over a bottle of coke in the Columbia Club. "It was hot, and it rained like hell. Boy, what mud!”

“Just like Ireland,” the corporal says, "except it was cold and muddy and rained like hell. How was the liquor down there?"

"Lousy."

"So was ours. The dolls was mostly red-heads in Ireland. Some pretty cute tricks."

“They was black in the Pacific. But there was some pretty cute ones at that, and they got whiter the longer you stayed. Then I went to Africa. It rained like hell."

“You're telling me. I was in Africa. Boy; what mud."

"Was you ever in Big-Bosomed Bertha's joint in Oran?"

"Yeah. The liquor was terrible. Some pretty cute dolls. I was in Sicily, too."

"Me, too. It rained like hell. And, mud! But some pretty cute dolls."

"I picked up a nice little dish in a joint in Catania. It was called Scarface Al Capone's joint by the GIs."

"Yeah. His liquor was lousy. Then I went to Italy. It rained like hell, and mud eight inches deep. But the dolls was cute. Was you ever in Baldy's joint in Naples?"

"Yeah. His liquor was lousy. When you going to Normandy?"

"Pretty soon, I hope. I'd like to see that country. The dolls are cute, they say. But it rains like hell and the mud's terrible."

“And they say the liquor's lousy. But anywhere to get out of England."

"You said it, Mac. It rains like hell here, and the mud's awful."

"And what they do to their liquor shouldn't be done to a dog. I'll sure be glad to get back home."

"Me, too. But I sure hope it don't rain like it did the day we left Camp Shanks. Boy, was the mud awful!"

"And I suppose if there's any liquor at all left there it sure as hell will be lousy."

"But there's no cuter dolls, pal."

"Nope, there's no cuter dolls."

YANK 20 Aug 1944 British Edition

Security Mission

2009-08-19T18:57:00.000-07:00

A dozen Rangers set out on a routine assignment in Italy. Then the Germans attacked.

By Pvt. Justin Gray

Italy

There were 12 of us. We were called by the colonel and told that we were to go on a security mission to guard a 4.2-mortar OP a half-mile in front of the lines. There was no tenseness—rather a certain sense of relaxation. It looked routine. We had been afraid that we would have to go on combat patrol.

We went back to our equipment, chattering. We were to meet the mortarmen — three observers—in half an hour. I drew two K rations, a dinner and a supper unit. Bills, our section leader, said: "Take beaucoup grenades." I took eight of them and made sure my bandolier was full of ammo. To make room for the grenades in my meat-can pouch, I put aside assorted Life Savers and dextrose tablets, keeping only a few peppermint drops. I started to pack.

Enemy artillery fire started laying in on us. Somebody said: "Those bastards down by Vesuvius. What the hell can we do with mortars? We can't even reach the Germans." I packed my field jacket, tooth brush and shaving equipment. I considered leaving my training gas mask behind but decided to take it. Stancil asked: "What are you going to do with a sharpshooter rifle, Gray? Shoot leaves?" I traded it in for an Ml with a boy who wasn't going on patrol. I filled my canteen with water and put leaves on my helmet.

We were on a little wooded knoll with short shrubby trees and shallow slit trenches. I leaned back in a trench, using my helmet as a headrest. I tried to kid with the boys. The tenseness mounted. Gerhardt, a Dutchman from Pennsylvania, made believe he was going to sleep. "Make me vake in 15 minutes." He always pretended to sleep but was more nervous than the rest of us.

Rona said: "Gray, don't you wish you were back in the noncombatant Engineers?" I snorted: “That redhead wouldn't love me so much if I were." My captain came along and suggested that I change, my red-top socks so only the gray showed. "Sonuvabitch, these damned leggin' laces always break. Wish we had those new combat infantry boots." Sgt. Bills took over and told us the order we were to march in. Bills was to lead off. "Nemo next with his tommy, supported by Nickson. Ford follows with his BAR. High-Gear Hodal next with extra ammo. Rona will lead the riflemen. Gray, you bring up the rear."

Then silence. We continued to wait. It was about noon. Complete quiet on the entire sector. It was warm for September. There were no combat patrols hitting us. Then machine-gun fire started above us. We heard German machine pistols. Some Tedeschi had infiltrated behind our lines. We wondered if there were more where we were going. "Damn, there are only 12' of us."

I wondered how I long the colonel wanted us to hold that OP if the Germans hit us. He never did tell us. "Why doesn't Bills go and find out?" "Gee, maybe a combat patrol would be better than this—at least you're moving." High-Gear Hodal started singing: "There's a Star-Spangled Banner waving somewhere, over a distant land so very far away. Only Uncle Sam's brave heroes get to go there; O how I wish I could go there, too . . ." Nickson swore: "I'll kill the bastard that wrote that song." But the tenseness relaxed. We were brave heroes far from home. Hodal was a cool character.

The three mortarmen came up and we moved out. We had a job to do; we were moving. I forgot my tension. I began to think of what I had to do and of the redhead back home.

Our lines were thinly stretched across the mountain. We had to go up through A Company, which was holding the line. It was surprising to see Rangers dug in like Infantry. The Army wasn't moving as fast as expected. I saw Stovell, my buddy in A Company. He yelled, “Bring back some souvenirs, Gray."

Our position was about a half-mile down the mountain in front of the lines. There were no Jerries in sight, and we reached it without incident. I could see Vesuvius and Naples in the distance. The valley stretched below us, green and clean. Overhead flew some P-38s on patrol. Everything looked easy. The mortarmen indicated the positions they wanted. We fanned out, knowing exactly what to do without orders. I took a position ahead of a little waddy. I threw off my pack and sat down. "Kay" Kyser called: "This is going to be a cinch." I thought so, too. I thought we'd be able to rest all afternoon. We deserved an easy job after the past few days.

I opened up my dinner unit and began to eat. Everybody was just as relaxed. We called back and forth to each other. We might as well have been out of combat. It was a beautiful clear day. Bills asked: "How about trading your cheese unit for my ham and eggs? I've got the GIs." I laughed at him. “The hell with you. I’ve got the GIs, too." I started munching away. There was so much undergrowth I couldn't see more than 15 yards ahead. One of the boys said: "It looks as though Italy couldn't grow a man-sized tree." Fleas started to itch in the seams of my pants. I scratched and swore. Suddenly I saw something moving in the brush about 12 yards away. My jaw froze. I felt like vomiting. It was a Jerry. Only one, I hoped. He! was coming right up the waddy. He came out in the open, looked, around and turned to signal the others to come through. Another came in sight. I don't know what the hell I did. Instinctively I must have dropped my food and picked up my rifle. I was glad I'd traded my sharp-shooter rifle for an M1; I could fire from the hip.

Without looking around I knew that Gerhardt had seen them, too. I knew I should have held my fire, but my finger squeezed the trigger. Almost immediately Gerhardt fired at the second one. Both of the Jerries went down. And then we knew there were many more Germans behind them. You could hear them moving in the bushes maybe 20 yards away, fanning out to see if we were an isolated unit or the main line.

It was only a matter of minutes before they would envelop us. Bills told us to cover our flanks. I moved way off to the right. I wondered whether Bills had asked the colonel if we had to hold this damned position. I was ready to leave. Some cinch! I got a pretty good position in a little defilade. I was still scared as a bastard. I wondered if the rest were as well located. At least the bullets couldn't reach me. I rose up to take a look. From my right flank a machine pistol sputtered. I smacked my face down on the ground. That was close. I took another look. Another machine pistol sputtered in front of me. A third one started on my left. I fired a couple of rounds at the man in front of me. Then I knew what was happening. One machine-pistolman was firing while the other two crawled closer to me. I could hear them. Then another fired and the other two crawled. I couldn't rise up any more to fire back.

I heard a scream on my left. Nemo was standing up, his tommy gun in his hands. He was hit in the chest. He ran at the Germans. A machine pistol opened up and tore the top of his head off. The rim of his helmet dropped down around his neck. I turned away and saw one of the mortar-men firing futilely with a .45 automatic.

My three Jerries were about six yards away. I could hear them. I couldn't do a thing. Suddenly I heard myself screaming: “Bills, Bills, get me the hell out of here." And there was Bills at my side. He had rushed down and surprised the Jerries. He killed two. l got the other.

It was time to leave the position. More Jerries were coming up. We all knew now that it was a full-fedged German assault on the main American lines. We could do no more good there. Bills gave the order and we started to retreat in pairs. Gerhardt covered me. I covered Gerhardt. We had to leave Nemo behind. It was hard going up the steep mountain. It hadn't been so steep when we came down. I thought about throwing away my rifle so I could scramble more quickly. The rifle was in my way, and I couldn't use my hands. "If we can only get up to A Company," I thought. "We have to warn them. What if they don't recognize us? What if they fire on us?"

We reached the top. We made it. The Germans hadn't been aggressive enough. A Company recognized us and held their fire. I saw Stovell and dropped into his ditch. I looked up and said: "Sorry, Stovell. No souvenirs.”

YANK 18 Aug 1944

Sniper Killer

2009-08-18T18:24:00.000-07:00

Sniper Killer

On the rifle of this Regular Army platoon sergeant are 22 notches. They represent dead Nazis. Soon there will be more of them.

By Sgt. WALTER PETERS

YANK Staff Correspondent

With U. S. Forces in France (By Cable) "It's a beautiful country. Wonderful for snipers, though. From now on, we don’t call anybody by rank. It's first names, from the Old Man down. Snipers may be nearby. They like to pick off the leaders.”

T/Sgt. Frank Kwiatek, a heavy-weapons platoon sergeant who's spent 27 of his 46 years in the Army, was doing the talking. We passed a reserve company where some of the men were taking a bath out of their helmets while others wrote letters or cleaned weapons.

Up ahead there was a clearing, in the hedges. We walked through it, crossed another field and reached another opening in the hedges on the other side. "All those openings were made by machine-gun fire," Kwiatek said.

As we walked up toward the front lines, Kwiatek's eyes darted from trees to hedges and back to trees again, like a hunter looking for a wild animal. "I got a sniper right up in that tree last week.” he said. "I guess we have them all cleaned up now but you never can tell. I'm not taking any chances."

A little later Kwiatek sat down on the, ground, pulled out his knife and began cutting a notch in his rifle. "Might as well do this while I have the time," he said. There were 21 notches, already and he was cutting the 22nd. "Three more to go and I'll have settled the promise I made when they killed my brother Ted. Then I’ll kill 25 more for my brother Jerry. After that I’m going to kill as many Germans as I can, because I hate the whole Nazi system."

Kwiatek was in Northern Ireland with his platoon when his brother Ted, a 21-year-old tank gunner, was killed in Sicily. Kwiatek swore before the men of his platoon that he'd get 25 Germans to avenge his brother’s death. Several weeks later another brother, 19-year-old Jerry, was killed in Italy and Kwiatek vowed to kill another 25 Germans.

So far he's killed 20 with his rifle and two with hand grenades. And he's probably killed "another dozen" with a tommy gun, but he doesn't count them because "when I kill a German, I like to look right into his eyes. I like to see him drop. When he drops, I can almost see my brothers smiling at me. I like shooting snipers especially; they're so sneaky." (Nineteen of the 22 notches represent snipers.)

Kwiatek shot his first German on June 10 when a sniper stopped the progress of his outfit at a crossroad near Cerisy La Foret. After a number of men had been killed and wounded, the company commander asked for a volunteer to eliminate the sniper. Kwiatek volunteered.

He prowled through the woods until he was 25 yards to the rear of the sniper, hidden behind a road marker. The sergeant was just getting ready to shoot the German when he spotted another sniper in a tree about 50 yards to his right. "I shot the sniper in the tree first and then exterminated the one behind the marker."

The sniper in the tree taught Kwiatek a lesson. "I decided that from then on I was going to watch every tree, every bush and every hedge."

A few minutes later the outfit passed the cross-road, with Kwiatek trailing behind his platoon to give rear protection. "I saw the hedges moving slightly. It was a little windy that day but the wind was blowing from the other direction, so I became suspicious. I tiptoed toward the hedge and saw a German. 'Hey,’ I yelled and when he turned to face me with his rifle ready in his hands, I let go. He keeled over backward. He was a goner—just another dead German. Later I discovered he was a captain in the German paratroop corps."

Kwiatek prides himself on being a scientific sniper hunter. "To kill snipers," he said, "you must use your head. But that doesn't mean you should stick your head over hedges, where the squareheads can take Coney Island potshots at you. I always tell my men to keep their heads down, but sometimes fellows forget. Then I can't tell them anything any more. It's, too late."

Once when one of Kwiatek's men stuck his head above the hedges to shoot, a sniper got him square through the head. "His brains splattered all over my face," Kwiatek said. "I was never so sick in my life.

"Rogers (Pfc. Floyd Rogers of Rising Star, Tex.) and I decided we were going to get that sniper. I told Rogers to take the dead man's helmet and hold it up over the hedge after l gave a signal. I walked 40 yards away and then signaled. As soon as the helmet went up, the sniper began shooting and gave away his position. Then I signaled to Rogers to lift the helmet again in another position. When he did, I saw the Hun's helmet come up from behind a tree, then his shoulders. Then I let him have it. All it took was one shot. Those bastards don't give you more than one shot."

Kwiatek, the oldest enlisted man in his outfit, spent 19 months as a machine gunner in France in the last war. He's been in the same platoon since 1924 and became platoon sergeant in 1940. His daughter is a captain in the Army's Nurse Corps in Italy.

Kwiatek's men call him "Hard Tack Murphy," a name he used as a welterweight fighter in the Army in the early 30s. "He's a damn good platoon sergeant," said Pfc. James W. Justus of Key West, Fla. "The only trouble is, he wants to finish off the war by himself. Every time I see him, he's looking at a tree. He's going to be a very sad man when the war is over and there are no more snipers to kill."

This article appeared in the British Edition in July of 44. In that version they showed a picture of T/Sgt. Kwiatek and the article was a little longer. This shows how the editors in each edition had latitude to create their paper as a custom fit for their area.

YANK 18 Aug 1944

Arm's Length From A Jap Battleship

2009-08-14T14:16:00.000-07:00

Arm’s Length from a Jap Battleship

By Sgt. Bill Reed

YANK Staff Correspondent

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii [By Cable]—George H. (Pluto) Platz AMM1c, a chunky Navy aerial gunner from the Bronx, N. Y., recently came close enough to a Jap battleship to touch a cable trailing from the stern.

Platz's TBF (Grumman Avenger) was based on a carrier of the Independence class, covering the Saipan operations with other units of the Pacific Fleet. Our landing force had been on Saipan for six days, and the warships patrolling the Philippine Sea expected a counterblow by the Jap Navy. For the first time, torpedoes were attached to the carrier's planes. Crews long accustomed to dummy torpedoes worked eagerly to get the TBFs into battle dress.

When word was flashed that the Jap Navy was edging closer to Saipan, eight fighter planes and four TBFs jumped from the carrier and 10 minutes later joined five more TBFs from another flat-top. It was late afternoon, and there wouldn't be much more daylight. What was far more serious, would the gas supply last long enough for the planes to find the enemy, do their work and fly back home to their carriers?

Lt. (jg) George P. Brown of Rochester, N. Y., acting executive officer of the group, was piloting the plane in which Platz flew as aerial gunner. It was no secret on the carrier that Brownie wanted a Jap flat-top. He'd flown 21 missions already, mostly long-range thrusts over Tarawa, Wake, Makin and Kwajalein, but he had never once come across anything larger than a Jap tanker. Brownie wasn't boastful or overambitious in his quest for a Jap carrier; he simply wanted one, that was all, the way some boys dream of becoming President or playing centerfield for the New York Yankees.

Before he took off from the carrier, Brownie confided to his squadron commander, Lt. Jim Alton; "This looks like it. I should get a chance at that carrier of mine."

The flight started out like any other flight. The men chewed gum, Brownie gave instructions to the pilots of the other planes for a rendezvous after the attack, and everybody kept his eyes open for what might prove to be the biggest target of the Pacific war.

The first bad break came after the planes had covered 100 miles: two of "the fighters developed engine trouble and turned back." It was a bad start," Platz says. "We knew the fighters were important. In a torpedo-plane job, the fighters and dive-bombers act as cover for the slow-moving TBFs. They're supposed to divert attention and draw ack-ack, leaving things comparatively safe for us. We have to go in low, as low as 300 feet, which makes us a swell target. If any dive-bombers were assigned to us on this mission, they never showed up. And now two of the fighters were out of the show. To make matters worse, Zeros came out to meet us, and that kept the fighters busy."

While the fighters and Zeros scrambled around the sky, Platz sighted some enemy tankers below. And then, in the distance, there loomed the sight that every American flyer in the Pacific has dreamed about: Jap battleships, cruisers, destroyers and carriers. They were dispersed in a wide area, separate groups of them. There was a carrier riding close to a battleship, and surrounding them were faster cruisers and destroyers.

In the largest group were two carriers, a battleship, two cruisers and about six destroyers. The larger carrier sat high up in the water, the prize of the lot, a 28,000-ton warship of the Hayataka class. Platz knew instinctively that Brown was going to head for it. He did and ordered three planes to follow him.

The flak started immediately. It came up like a curtain, thick and deadly. When small dark puffs of smoke popped around the plane, followed by gushes of white and then blinding fire, Platz knew his TBF was sailing through a barrage of phosphorous shells.

Brown dropped the nose of his plane toward the sea at 4,000 feet and was about to glide in to the carrier from 1,000 when the TBF suffered its first damage.

"Jap tracers had been getting closer and closer," says Platz. "Then the plane jumped and rocked. They had hit us below the turret in the fuselage. Part of the wing was flapping off, but I didn't realize we were on fire until the turret became hot. The radio gear under me was covered with white smoke. I tried to call the pilot, but the radio wouldn't work. Everything was smoking. I decided to get the hell out."

Platz worked his way to the hatch and found Ellis C. Babcock ARM2c of Buffalo, N. Y., the radioman, waiting for him. He'd been strafing the most active destroyer when the TBF was hit. Platz grinned at his shipmate, shoved him out and then jumped.

Both watched their ship continue on toward the carrier. For the first time they realized that Lt. Brown was still at the controls. The flaming plane streaked toward the carrier, now attempting to escape by turning sharply to the right. It turned at exactly the right moment and Brown's torpedo rammed into its side, a dead hit.

Then a TBF piloted by Lt. (jg) Benjamin C. Tate of Pulaski, Va., swung in from the same side and caught the carrier amidships with its fish. Platz and Babcock, still parachuting down, saw the wakes of three torpedoes converge on the carrier. It rocked and heaved. The prize plum had been plucked.

After strafing the carrier's planes, Tate climbed out of the range of ack-ack and hunted for the other TBFs. He finally found Lt. Brown's plane, no longer aflame but smoking and rocking from side to side as it flew at a low altitude.

“I could see that his aerial had been shot away, the tail and fuselage were full of holes and the bomb bay was still open," Tate says. "Brown was sitting in the cockpit, as dazed as a football player at the bottom of a pile-up. I tried to get him to follow me, but he couldn't. He held up his right arm and pointed to the blood on it, then to his body. My gas was running low, so made a careful check of his position and headed home. We ran out of gas within sight of an American destroyer. We got into our rafts and watched our plane sink three minutes later.”

The destroyer's searchlights found them quickly. Tate's radioman, J. F. Siwicki ARM2c of Mattapan,| Mass., signaled with his flashlight and shouted for joy when the searchlights blinked back an R (for Roger). "It was the most beautiful signal I ever saw/' Tate said.

Lt. Warren R. Omarck of Valley Stream, N. Y., pilot of still another of the TBFs, had a grandstand seat at the show. He was the third in line when the planes went in for the attack, but his dive was too steep and he had to level off again.

This brought him in position 35 or 45 seconds behind the others. Robert E. Ranes of Milwaukee, Wis., his radioman, tried to take pictures on the way down, dividing his time between that and a .30-caliber gun and reporting the position of Jap tracers to Lt. Omarck.

"The carriers were firing too high and the cans were shooting too low to benefit the Imperial Government," Ranes recalls with a chuckle. "But they came too close for comfort at that. I felt I could reach out and grab a handful of smoke On the way to the rendezvous point, a Zero and a Val (Jap dive-bomber) swooped down on them. J. E. Prince of Camden, Ark., the turret gunnery was a busy man for a while. He scared off the Zero and opened up wide on the Val. Apparently neither Jap was in the mood to give chase and both turned back.

Lt. Omarck's plane continued on and also met up with Lt. Brown, who still seemed dazed and bloody, just as Tate had found him. Brown's TBF was evidently out of control and constantly losing speed. Omarck did everything he could, turning on his wing lights so Brown could see, hovering around as the crippled plane dropped closer to the sea. At 2045 hours, Omarck's gunner reported: "We've lost him.

"I made a few S turns," says Omarck, "but Brownie had disappeared. I think he fainted in the cockpit and crashed. I went on in and called the ship to tell them about Brownie because I didn't think I'd get back."

Lt. Brown was never heard from again but Omarck's plane made it back to the carrier—with less than a gallon of gasoline to spare. The engine coughed three or four times after the TBF hit the deck and then died.

But the adventure was far from over for Platz and Babcock. They landed safely in the water and bobbed around for hours within sight of the Jap fleet. Platz found himself an arm's length of an enemy battleship.

"I thought I might be sucked into the screws," Platz said, "but the warship's wake pushed me away. I ducked under what was left of my Mae West and, when I came up, I was close enough to touch a large cable trailing from the stern."

After the American planes left, Platz says, the Zeros clustered around the blazing carrier and tried to land. Explosions rocked the big ship, and soon it was ablaze from bow to stern. The Zeros sought out berths on other carriers while cruisers and destroyers gathered around the stricken flat-top, playing their searchlights, picking up survivors and signaling furiously to other ships in the neighborhood. They worked until what Platz and Babcock figured was midnight and then moved away, apparently realizing that other American planes and ships might be heading in their direction. The two Americans could see the silhouettes of the ships moving away reluctantly leaving the carrier to its fate.

"It could have been an Orson Welles production or a Fourth of July pageant,'' Platz says. "The night was filled with the shrieks of drowning men, with blinking lights and piercing whistles. To Americans who'd been saying 'Remember Pearl Harbor’ it was a beautiful sight."

Then the carrier disappeared in the darkness like a setting sun.

Platz and Babcock had been watching the Jap warship from different spots in the water. They blew loudly on their Mae West whistles now in the hope of contacting one another but were unsuccessful until dawn approached. "We couldn't see each other," Babcock says, "until we got within about 10 feet, and when we did meet we began to ask each other silly questions—like 'Have you got a raft?' Then we locked arms and floated till sunrise."

"We'd been in the water about 10 hours," Platz says, "and our teeth were chattering. I could feel Babcock shivering and I guess I was, too."

The life jacket Platz wore had been half ripped away by shrapnel, and his back and buttocks had been seared by flying metal. The wounds were more like scratches than the ones he sustained over Makin that won him the Purple Heart. "But they sure felt uncomfortable," he says.

Shortly after dawn, American fighter planes flew high above them, so high that Babcock decided not to risk wasting his dye marker. About a half-hour later however, more planes appeared at a lower level, apparently on a search mission. Babcock released the dye and he and Platz churned the water with their legs to attract attention. The planes swung around and went back but returned quickly with three TBFs, each of which dropped a rubber raft. Babcock and Platz recovered two of the rafts, tied them together and climbed aboard.

Then began a long wait. The men watched the planes disappear and gratefully drank water and ate food tablets they found in the raft compartments. They knew the planes would be back but they also realized it might be hours.

The day grew hotter and hotter, and the wait proved even longer than they had anticipated. Platz found some sunburn lotion and rubbed it gently into his wounds. Hours passed. The two men sprawled on their rafts and waited.

About noon, Babcock thought he heard someone swimming toward the rafts. He propped himself up and scanned the water. About three swells away he saw something that made him gasp and call to Platz. They both sat up and stared incredulously: it was a Jap aviator swimming frantically toward them.

"We didn't know what to do” Platz says. "As he got closer, we realized it was no optical illusion. We could see his fat round face, slanted eyes, thin mustache and cropped hair. He was waving a pistol in one hand."

The two Americans had only a hunting knife. They grabbed for their paddles and began pushing away as strongly as they could.

"The swells kept bringing him closer," says Babcock. "We didn't stop to figure that his gun was probably so wet it wouldn't fire. We paddled hard and gradually pulled away from him. Finally the Jap became tired out, and we could see him inflate his trousers and use them as a float. Soon we lost sight of him."

About 11600 hours an OS2U (Kingfisher) dropped from the sky and skidded over them. The flying boat had already picked up a fighter pilot, but Platz and Babcock were taken aboard until another Kingfisher swooped down to share the load. Babcock was transferred to it, and the two planes returned to the U. S. fleet off Saipan. The adventure was over.

The Battle for St. Lo - Part 3

2009-08-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

The Battle for St. Lo – Part 3

…and then St. Lo was freed

By Sgt. Walter Peters

YANK Staff Correspondent

St. Lo—Far back, in the headquarters of the 29 Division from which a small task force of about 300 men began its mission to occupy St. Lo, it seemed almost as quiet as a section of the New England countryside. Only the division's own guns and the clatter of rolling Sherman tanks could be heard. The 29th had been nibbling toward the city for some time. Now the worst seemed to be over. The men had battled their way through marshlands, hills, dikes, and hedges. They had even fought through a river, shoulder-deep. Now at last had come the time for occupying the city itself.

The task force gathered in an orchard, standing in long columns of twos. They were especially picked men—infantrymen, engineers, artillery observers, medics, and even a group of MP and Civil Affairs officers.

The Division Commander—Major General Charles H. Gerhardt—stood there, holding a cigar in his right hand and at the same time whittling a walking stick cut down from a branch of a tree. "This is an historic affair," he said in a slow, clear voice. Some of the men stopped chewing gum and their faces became more serious. “I want every man to be on his mettle," the general continued. " We must be ready to meet, anything at all. We are representing the division and the American Army, and I want every one of you not to let them down for one minute. You must prepare yourself for anything the enemy may throw at you. Be on the alert. Be on your guard. We are going to carry this mission out."

The executive officer, a colonel, stepped forward. "Men," he said, “I want you to pay close attention. In case a man is wounded or if it is necessary to get a message through, only one man will leave. If there are four men on a mission, three of them must continue while the other goes back. This applies to whatever may happen. Another thing—all vehicles will be at 60-yard intervals. Anyone who violates this will be sent back and miss the fun."

A private in the line looked at his buddy. "Is he kidding?" he muttered.

The colonel conferred a moment with the general, and then turned to the men again. "It's been changed," he said. "One hundred yards is the interval. One hundred yards."

I piled into an artillery radio observation jeep with Capt. E. G. Gifford of South Orange, N.J.; T/5 Floyd McCarland, of Long Island City, N.Y.; and , Pfc. Albert Harazamus, of Chicago.

The task force had been scheduled to start out at 1500, but it didn't get moving until 30 minutes later. Meanwhile, the men in our jeep were gossiping with the GIs in the jeep ahead of us. "Remember Puncis, the little Italian guy? " McCarland asked. "Yeah," a soldier in, the other jeep said. "He's with us now," McCarland said. "Good man," the captain said. "Remember_______” McCarland asked. “Yeah," the soldier up front said. "He got knocked off.” McCarland said. “Jees, that's awful!" the other man exclaimed.

Tanks began to pull out of the orchard. The infantrymen followed in trucks, and we followed the engineers behind the infantry. We drove at such a slow pace and stopped so many times it seemed that we wouldn't get there before midnight.

It was now 1630 hours and we were still two miles from St. Lo. All along the dusty country road was evidence of the great battles that had been fought by forward troops days before. There was the stench of the bodies of dead cows and there were skeletons of tanks and trucks. Off the road, behind a hedgerow, GI equipment was strewn all over the grass— hand grenades, .30-calibre clips with bullets, and many personal effects. At one spot was a GI helmet with three holes torn through its casing, and nearby were a number of letters scattered about in disorder.

Some of the letters were from a girl, written apparently to the soldier whose helmet had been torn. "I know you'll come through with flying colors,'' one of them read. "Please, dear, keep writing. I'll be anxiously waiting to hear from you. I'd love to see your funny face. Hurry home." Another letter, from the same girl, ended thus: "I love you more than anything or anyone in this world—always, Lilian."

There was also an unfinished letter from the soldier to the girl. "Sweetheart," he had begun, "since I left the States as per usual I have saved all your mail and I really had quite a batch up to last night. I carried them all in a little cardboard folder, all arranged in order of dates. Last night I took them and as I read each one of them, I tore them up. It hurt as far as sentiment goes, but I feel safer if I don't carry them on my person. I hope you don't mind. Yesterday the company took a little walk to a brook where we proceeded to strip and take a bath. Remember the pictures we used to see in Pathe News of boys taking a bath in the river? Well, that's just the way we looked. I hope Mom and Pop got the picture situation straightened out and that Pop won." That's the way the letter ended.

There was also a general letter from the President addressed to members of the armed forces. "Never were the enemies of freedom more tyrannical, more arrogant, more brutal," the letter read in part. Near this was a Catholic prayer book opened to page 24, which read: “In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen."

As we moved to within about a mile, and a half of the city, the vehicles were forced to stop. The enemy was shelling the road heavily. Snipers were busy, too. They were shooting at the task force from hills on the right and from orchards on the left. After the shelling subsided a little, we moved on. Then the snipers fired again, the vehicles stopped, and the men scrambled out with rifles and tommy guns, looking around for the attackers. Then we moved on, and stopped again. And so it went.

When we got around a semicircular bend in the road the enemy began throwing shells heavier than before. "Lay down, lay down, you crazy jerks!" shouted a soldier at a couple of men who continued walking as the shells began hitting the road.

To the front of us, infantrymen were walking single file on both sides of the road, and in front of them the tanks were leading the way in. When it appeared that Captain Gifford's jeep could go no further, I excused myself and ran forward to join the infantrymen.

All along the road, from then on, it was a matter of ducking and running. I think we dove into roadside gulleys about 40 times before we reached a distillery where a road sign said we were entering the city of St. Lo.

A sniper was firing through an opening to one side of the distillery. Sgt. Thomas C. Taylor, squad leader from Tallahassee, Fla., aimed his M1 and shot at the opening. After the shot, he continued his trek through the residential part of the city.

Then a medical jeep rolled by and stopped. An officer was lying on a stretcher hoisted onto the jeep, his pants cut from his backside. After a quick glance, the men turned their heads away from the deep wounds.

A shell whistled overhead. Everybody took to the roadside, "There's a cemetery," shouted a soldier. The shell hit a monument, and as it did, little pieces of granite hit the road.

General Gerhardt was standing in the center of the crossroads. A number of infantrymen had already fanned out into the city streets, searching for Germans who might have been left behind. Somebody said there were 200 of them hiding in buildings. How many more Nazis were on the hill facing the crossroads we'll probably never know.

"Four volunteers," the colonel yelled.

Four men came forward.

"Okay, go out there and clean them out," the colonel said, pointing to a street from which a machinegun was firing.

"Four more volunteers," yelled the colonel. The men were busy elsewhere and didn't hear him. "I said I want four volunteers," the colonel shouted louder. Then, as the men remained busy, he told a sergeant to find him four volunteers.

For a while the scene seemed like one in a basic-training barracks. "All right," the sergeant walking around yelled. "Four men. All right now. Step on the double." Four men dashed over.

At 1810 one of the volunteers came in with a prisoner. Then another volunteer came in with two more prisoners.

Just at that time it seemed as though the whole German artillery had broken loose. Shells began falling around the crossroads.

"Those prisoners brought them on," a private said. "It's those goddam prisoners. They spotted them walking down here."

While shells were falling and everyone else was taking cover, the general was calmly walking around with his stick. One shell broke through the side of a building across the street from us. Then another sailed through the same spot in the wall.

"Daily double," a captain yelled.

A soldier ran over to the colonel.

"They've got an observation tower on the hill, sir," the soldier said. The colonel looked up at the hill through binoculars.

A tank pulled up to the crossroads. "Come out here," the general yelled at the tank commander.

The tank commander didn't hear. "Get that damn helmet off so you can hear me," the general shouted, at the same time banging on the tank with his stick. The commander came out.

After a few words with the general and the colonel, the tank commander took the tank onto a road leading into the heart of the city.

Wounded men were sitting or lying down with their backs to a brick building. "Bring me some water, please," one of the wounded men asked.

A captain brought some water and, while the man was drinking more shells came in, all hitting within 50 feet from where the leading men of the task force stood. Some came much closer, too close.

A shell hit a building 20 feet from us, and as it did, debris crumbling from the wall fell on some men. Inside the building, still hanging on one of the remaining three walls, was a lone picture of Jesus Christ.

Another tank commander collared the colonel.

"I can get that observation tower," the commander said.

"Well, go ahead. What are you waiting for?" the colonel asked.

"Permission, sir."

"You've got it. Go ahead. Go ahead."

The tank began moving from the crossroads toward the hill. Just then, a herd of cows slowly moved across the road. A shell hit behind the last cow. She turned her head to look and then slowly turned her head back again and continued to follow the herd.

“Stupid animal. Most stupid animal in the world except an ox," a lieutenant said.

After the cows moved out, the tank rolled over and stopped when it reached a position where it could get a "bee" on the observation tower. Then it began to lob out shells.

An ambulance moved up and I thought it had come to pick up the wounded. Later I discovered in the ambulance the body of a major, a regimental executive officer who had been killed by a shell a day or two earlier. The men said he had been determined to get St. Lo, and when he died they vowed to take his body there. They covered his body, with a flag and placed him on the altar of a nearby church. The day after we moved into the city men were still passing by, placing flowers on the flag-draped body.

At about 1900 hours, the colonel got out the division flag. S/Sgt. Gerald F. Davis, of Bellefontaine, O., gave T/5 Francis L. Beins, Jr. of Tulsa, Okla., a boost up alongside the wall of a building. Beins took the flag from the colonel and stuck its pole in a chink in the wall. When the flag hung out, the soldiers smiled. One sergeant said: "Isn't it pretty? Brother, isn't that a pretty sight?”

Ten minutes later the colonel walked over to a soldier with a walkie-talkie. "Can you get
division?" he asked.

"I think so, sir," said the soldier.

“Okay, tell them St. Lo was taken at five-thirty."

Battle for St. Lo - Part 2

2009-08-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

The Battle for St. Lo – Part 2

Meanwhile, Outside St. Lo

By Sgt. Bill Davidson

YANK Staff Correspondent

Before St. Lo.—"Hedgerow warfare" is a new term, which has bludgeoned its way into the military vocabulary and will probably be taught to sweating West Point plebes for many years to come. The hedgerows in this part of the front must be seen to be believed. They are six feet high and six feet thick, and form breastworks which line every road and every field. These hedgerows were here generations before the kings of Normandy imported them to the cattle-raising sections of England, and they have been packed down into cement-like hardness by the pressure of centuries. I have seen 88mm. and 105mm. shells score direct hits on hedgerows—and blast holes barely large enough for two men to squeeze through together.

Because of the hedgerows, you can't see the enemy. The front is fluid, and often you don't know whether the field next to you is occupied by friend or foe. It's like a huge game of cops and robbers, with all the chips down, and our men find themselves chasing around in circles, trying to catch the enemy from the rear. They rarely speak of having advanced a mile. Instead, it's, "We advanced eleven hedgerows,” or, "We advanced eleven fields." Normally “No Man's Land” is the width of a single field, but sometimes it's only the width of a single hedgerow. This happens after prolonged firing, when both sides are regrouping and are too tired to move much. Then our men hear the Jerries talking a few feet away on the other side of the hedge.

This kind of warfare is right up the alley of the sniper, bazooka expert, rifleman, and automatic-weapons handler. Conversely, it's death on tanks and armored cars, as scores of German vehicles burned to a peculiar shade of pink along the roadsides give mute evidence. The destruction of equipment is appalling. Vehicles seldom get beyond the first soldier they meet who happens to be armed with a rifle grenade or bazooka. Lt, Jack Shea, a tough, young general's aide who goes up into the line to lead patrols, says: “Give me ten infantrymen in this terrain, with proper combinations of small arms, and I'll hold up a battalion for 24 hours."

The guy on the ground is the big man here, and I there isn't much in the book to tell him what to do. He just uses what he's got and improvises. Right now, for instance, the infantrymen are employing an effective substitute for mortar fire. They fire rifle grenades at a high angle of elevation by firing their rifles from the ground, butts down. The grenade is fused for five seconds. It describes a high arc, travelling forward about 200 feet, and then at the end of the five seconds explodes in the air over the heads of the Germans, who are sheltered from other bursts from the front and sides. This air-burst fragmentation is usually fatal. One rifle-grenade-man in this sector once used his weapon to eliminate an enemy sniper. He spotted the German in an apple tree, crawled up to within a 40-foot range, and let go at the back of the German's helmet. The Nazi disintegrated.

Throughout the fighting, French farmers and their families live in holes dug in cellars, while their houses are destroyed over their heads. When the fighting passes beyond them, or during lulls, children come out to play and farmers bring butter and eggs to the GIs.

These lulls are necessary in hedgerow warfare. After a certain number of hours of advancing through fields, both sides are so worn out that the soldiers must stop to rest, regroup, and gather up the dead and wounded. The word "lull" is a misnomer, of course. Snipers keep on working, mortar and artillery shells plop down, and patrols go out at night. But it's like Sunday in Central Park compared with what's gone before. It was during one of these lulls that I moved up to the front.

The unit I was with—the 29th Division—had launched a big attack the day before to capture high ground dominating the big hedgehog city of St. Lo from the East. The men had advanced all day and occupied the villages of St. Andre de L'Epine and Martinville, cutting the main highway from Bayeux to St. Lo. During the night they reached their objective and stopped to allow another unit on the right flank to catch up. All night the artillery blasted in our ears. The 105s cracked, seemingly in the next field. Farther back, the Long Toms banged with their deep bass tones and shells went rushing overhead like fast freights passing tiny way-stations on the Pennsylvania Railroad line. It's amazing how you learn to sleep through such artillery barrages— that is, when the stuff is going in the right direction.

In the morning the artillery quieted down and I took off in a jeep with Cpl. Al White, of Rutherford, N.J., and Lt. Tucker Irvin, of Washington, Ga. White is 38 years old, a 115-pound ex-newspaperman who fought on the beach on D-Day and had been in or near the lines ever since. Irvin is a quiet, good-looking young Presbyterian College graduate who was brought up with a squirrel rifle in his hands. He's a dead shot with the carbine and once accepted a general's challenge to outshoot anyone in the division. Irvin beat the general, squatting at 75 yards, with five bulls out of five shots, thereby winning himself a purse of 10 shillings.

The jeep we rode in was a combat vehicle, related only genetically to the more or less comfortable Army conveyances which ply the highways behind the lines and elsewhere. The tops of these combat jeeps are stripped off completely, the windshields are turned down and covered with canvas, and there are sandbags on the floor. The sandbags make it necessary to ride with your knees drawn up in front of you, and your legs become numb after a while. But the sandbags also lessen your chances of getting killed by fragments should the jeep run over a mine.

We drove a mile or so down the main highway toward St. Lo, and then turned off onto a dirt road to the new CP. Tired, dirty signalmen and engineers stared at us from the side of the road as we passed. We paused only briefly at the CP, because the cloud of dust raised by the jeep had given away our position to the enemy, who promptly slammed eight rounds of 88mm. shells into the area from a neighboring ridge. “There may be something wrong with the morale of the Germans on the other sides of the front," White remarked, as we ducked into a hole, "but there's nothing wrong with those boys over there. It's an element of a parachute division made up of young Nazis—the same kids the Americans ran into down at Cassino."

We moved down the road, slowly now because of the dust, but speeding up again whenever we passed openings in the hedgerows to prevent any snipers present from getting a decent chance to line up their sights. We were in an area that had been fought over the day before. Dozens of burned-out tanks and armored cars lay in the fields beside the road. Trees were broken and charred where mortar fire had singed them. Armor-piercing shells had punched little round holes in the tops of the hedgerows. The dead had been cleared away, but still the smell of death was everywhere.

We passed a column of medics walking up from the front with the stoop-shouldered shuffles of the intolerably weary. Then we rounded a turn and came into the only street of what had once been the village of St. Andrew de L'Epine.

The village had been pounded by our artillery for days. Not a single building was intact. Usually parts of two adjacent walls remained erect, but the rest of the houses they had served had caved in. In the rubble of one house stood a fine mahogany chest of drawers, undamaged. In the ruins of another house, a little gray kitten played, unperturbed. The village church was recognizable as such only by the framework of a single window which remained. The graveyard had been torn up by shells, leaving fragments of tombstones and long-buried coffins strewn about.

There were signs posted everywhere incongruously proclaiming: "This town off limits for all military personnel." Since there was nothing left of the village, it seemed an unlikely spot for GIs to get in trouble. The signs were standard battalion equipment, however, and meant that the rubble had not yet been cleared of booby traps and mines.

Signs notwithstanding, a handful of doughboys were hanging around the remains of the village street, staring moodily off into space. These men in the front lines don't talk much, nor do they collect souvenirs, plenty of which were flying about. A jeep passed by, towing a trailer loaded with German equipment. "These are for the Air Corps boys," the Pfc. driving the jeep yelled as he went by.

Down the street a squad of dirty, unkempt GIs was shoveling dirt from an embankment to cover the carcass of a cow killed during the fighting. The men belonged to a pioneers-and-ammunition platoon, the American equivalent of the famous British sappers. P&A men can do anything. They are the infantry's own engineers and they build bridges, clear mines and booby traps, carry out wounded, fight in the line, and bury dead cows. This particular group consisted of Pfc. Bill Gayron, of Brooklyn, N.Y.; Pfc. Eugene Jackson, of New Orleans; Pvt. John Leake, of Charlottesville, Va.; Sgt. Edward Wilson, of Middletown, O.; Pfc. Ben Williams, of Piggott, Ark., and T/5 Garland Holdren, of Roanoke, Va. They were all bearded and dirty and dripping with fatigue. The rain had soaked through their field jackets so many times that the cloth now had the consistency of a light suntan shirt.

As they worked, Jackson, an ex-master plumber whose black beard was streaked with gray, told me what they had done during the fighting of the day before. They moved out with G Company early in the morning, firing rifles side by side with the others in the hedgerows. Then six of the P&A men were called upon to blow up a road block, one field away from the enemy so that a Red Cross truck could go into “No Man's Land” and pick up the wounded. They went down the road to the block and when they got there found that our troops had withdrawn so that our artillery could plaster the area. They went to work under the shelling just the same, and in half an hour the road block was destroyed. The job took half an hour because they could only peck away at the obstruction while darting in and out of the hedge to avoid the enemy's bullets. The medics’ truck went in and the P&A men provided covering fire for the medics until all the wounded were cleared out of the field.

The P&A men went back then and were detailed to go into another field, one which the medics had not been able to reach, in order to drag out some more casualties. They crawled in on their bellies and crawled out again with nine dead and ten wounded. They carried the dead and wounded back a quarter of a mile or so and laid them along the road where the medics could see them. Then they were told to get mine detectors and bazookas, and move up again with G Company, which was holding up an attempt to push our men back.

The P&A men cleared about a dozen mines and booby traps and knocked out two German armored cars. They were pulled out of line at midnight. Then each had to stand three hours guard until six a.m. the next morning. After a few hours sleep, they were given the job of burying cows. "And it's a big sunnavbitchin’ cow," said Pfc. Williams.

We left the P&A platoon and moved up a few fields to where some other men were resting in foxholes along a hedgerow, greedily eating their first hot meal in some time. The meal had been prepared for them by T/4 Ray Harrod, of Louisville, Ky., and consisted of chicken, spinach, pineapple, and coffee. The men of the other companies were coming out of the line now. Some of them wandered into the field, their weapons resting wearily on their shoulders. They stood there, staring dumbly at the men eating. They didn't say a word. Capt. Charles Cawthon, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., the company commander, spotted them and without saying a word either, borrowed messkits and handed them full of steaming food, to the newcomers.

Three BAR men of another company came up out of the line. They had just been relieved. They were so tired they could scarcely carry their 20-pound guns. They were a gunner, an assistant gunner, and an ammunition carrier. One of them, Pvt. Foy Gamble, of Florence, Ala., had seen his assistant gunner picked off by a sniper right next to him in the same foxhole. The assistant gunner’s blood was still on Gamble's field jacket. “The Jerries are smart,” said Pfc. Filadelfio Padilla, of Holman, N.M. “They pass up riflemen and go for us automatic-weapons men." " But they ain't smart enough," said Pvt. Joseph Prouse of De Ridder, La. “We advanced 15 hedgerows yesterday.”

Other men drifted into the field, which was less than 500 yards from the enemy. These men had come out of the line earlier that morning, and it was amazing what a shave and a few hours sleep had done for them. They stood around reading Stars and Stripes of the day before and looking over the typed BBC news bulletin sent up to them from the division CP. Some talked about the fighting on the Russian front. They were craftsmen discussing their trade.

"They're booby-trapping more now," said S/Sgt. Guillermo Garcia, a former steelworker from El Paso, Tex. “They've had more time to set them now.” Garcia, a Bronze Star infantryman, had taken his 57mm. anti-tank gun crew up to within 100 feet of the enemy the day before and held off a dozen or so enemy tanks on the flank of the advance. They had fought off a German patrol, endured 24 hours of constant shelling, and he himself had crawled back 100 yards with a field telephone to establish contact with battalion headquarters.

“It's the old men who pull us through every time” said T/Sgt. Clyde England, of Martinsville, Va. "The new men hit the ground and freeze. You've got to fire and keep moving." Sgt. England's heavy-machinegun platoon had moved ahead on the left flank. When they were stopped by an enemy machinegun nest in a hedgerow, he split up the platoon into two sections, each of which fired at the enemy gun from opposite ends of the field. Enemy gunners traversed back and forth for a while, trying to answer both fires. Then the Germans got flustered. They left their gun and ran. As they ran, Sgt, England's guns cut them down.

"If shelling starts and you can't get into a hole," said Pfc. Howard Wells, of Martinsville, Va., " best thing to do is lie on your back. If you get hit, a stomach wound ain't as serious as a spine wound."

Just then a flurry went around the field. The 'Old Man himself—Major General Charles H. Gerhardt, commander of the 29th—was there to speak to them. The general gathered the non-coms under a hedgerow, just out of sight of the Germans on the next ridge. "Men," he said, "you've got a helluva lot to be proud of. You've been in here since the first assault and you've turned in a performance that everyone is talking about back home. You've faced the best the enemy has. You're in a hard racket—the hardest there is. But you all look hard.”

“We've captured the high ground dominating St. Lo. The city has become a symbol." He paused and looked around. "I don't want to make any promises to you men, but one of these days we're going to be relieved. And then there are going to be plenty of 48-hour passes for everyone.''

The general spoke a little longer and left. The men looked at each other stunned, as if 48-hour passes were something out of another world they had forgotten completely about. The sun broke through the overcast and the bluebells became radiant in the hedgerows. The men sat there for a long time. Then T/Sgt. William Rosenthal, of Atlantic City, N.J., got up and trudged silently down the road, past weary columns of men, to the outpost line. He wanted to have another look at the shattered rooftops of St. Lo, which were just barely visible from the edge of the ridge.

Battle for St. Lo - Part 1

2009-08-08T14:44:00.000-07:00

South Through The Hedgerows

By Sgt. Saul Levitt

YANK Staff Correspondent

South of La Haye du Puits—the web of the war, as it reaches south through Normandy, is catching some strange flies. In the action one morning south of La Haye du Puits, Americans pushing on a few hundred yards farther through the tricky hedgerows and wooded hill country of Normandy flushed an odd assortment of prisoners; Russians, Poles, and one young Yugoslav. Later in the day, they came up with two French lads of 15, who were blithely wandering around in the midst of machine-gun and rifle fire.

The GI finger on the trigger in this nerve-racking skirmishing warfare from field to field tends to get very tight. This produces hairline decisions as to whether that gray-green tunic that shows in front of the sights is to be a German prisoner or a German corpse. There is practically no time at all in which to discuss armistice terms in this sort of fighting. Pvt. Lawrence Weihl, a thin, dark-faced soldier from Detroit, and Sgt. Nathaniel Meadows of Miami, were two of the infantrymen in one unit who got their prisoners because the opposition came out of hiding with hands held high in the air and with no weapons. The tight finger on the trigger did not relax, but it didn't let go, either.

Over the heads of prisoners and captors alike lobbed the artillery. The setting was back-country Normandy: a stone farmhouse out of which the prisoners had come, a muddy path, high trees casting big shadows on the ground. The prisoners were led back from the whistling fire of the small guns to the regimental prisoner-collection point in a clearing a few hundred yards behind the action. You entered the clearing through a break in the hedgerow. At the break there were signs of recent German occupancy from early this morning or last night: cartridges, potato-masher grenades, empty milk cans, and a torn illustrated magazine. The prize picture in the magazine was of two frauleins dressed in the last stages of strip-tease costume. According to the German caption, they are talking about men and their point is that males don't want to talk to you first, they only want to make love; and afterwards they won't get sociable, either, because they're too tired.

Past this strewn German equipment came the prisoners and their flat-faced captors. In the clearing were a lieutenant and a sergeant—interrogators who, between them, knew German and French. They tried out both languages on the prisoners but couldn't get anywhere; none of the infantrymen could help either. The way things stood at first, the GIs spoke only American, the pair of interrogators could translate only French or German, and the prisoners were strictly limited to Russian, Polish, and Yugoslav. The atmosphere was very tense and very tight at first, more strained than in the ordinary prisoner-bagging operation because some of these prisoners wore civilian clothes. The infantrymen who had captured them held neutral, hard expressions on their faces, as if to say it didn't make much difference if they killed a prisoner or brought him in. They were far from home with men in front of them who were hostile, their single reflex action was the trigger-pull —and pulling it was the right way to talk to strangers ninety-nine-and-a-half percent of the time. The prisoners knew this and they had been very frightened when caught and were still frightened now, a little like animals sensing danger in the wind.

It was a sunny day in the clearing, and the thick green grass and the tall trees bordering this small open space bent under a warm wind. Between captors and prisoners there was now no effort at communication. The one man among the prisoners whom everybody looked at hardest was a little man dressed in a striped shirt, black pants, and a black cap. He had the broad, heavy face and compact, strong body and stubby hands of a laborer or a farmer. His face was pink and shiny with sweat. After a while a soldier from Philadelphia, who knew a little Russian, came into the clearing and tried to speak to this man. The soldier held on to his rifle and listened and then turned his head sideways and said: “The guy claims he was captured by the Germans and moved to France to work. He was working Cherbourg, he says. He managed to get away before we closed in on Cherbourg and has been hiding away in the woods."

" I'll bet he hates Hitler like poison too," said one of the infantrymen.

“Ask him if he was a Russian soldier or a civilian when captured by the Germans.”

The little man broke into a torrent of speech and the translating soldier said: "He claims he was a Russian soldier and was captured in the Ukraine."

The little man motioned toward a sheet of paper and pencil held by one of the interrogators. On the paper he wrote, “1941.”

" Ask him what he did before he got in the Army."

The translator asked, and the little man made a motion of someone swinging a scythe and said, “Kolkhoz.”

"He worked on some kind of a big farm," said the Translator.

The soldier from Philadelphia now gave the little man a cigarette. The faintest beginning of a smile moved across the prisoner's face, but it didn't quite emerge into a real smile. For the first time since he had been marched down from the front, he felt a little easier. He had communicated with someone. It was apparent now that he knew he wasn't going to be shot immediately. Clearly he had known no luxuries for a long time, and to be given a cigarette, to be allowed to sit down in the thick grass, and to know that he was not going to be shot immediately were luxuries of the highest category. He stretched his sturdy, small figure in the grass, finished his cigarette, and then dozed.

Around him were the other prisoners. Several men stood guard over them, but the other infantrymen went over to the edge of the clearing and, like the prisoners, stretched in the thick grass. For captors as well as prisoners it was a moment of peace. The tautness could go out of muscles, the eyes could shut. You could imagine anything while lying in the tall grass of a Normandy clearing, even the impossible like maybe it wasn't Normandy at all, but the tall grass of the Susquehanna Valley. The inhumanly flat expression went out of faces. The sound of gunfire and of the artillery overhead seemed odd suddenly, and Weihl, the boy from Detroit who had captured two men by himself a little while before and had marched them down a muddy road with his finger tight on the trigger of his rifle, said wonderingly: " Will somebody tell me the sense in this business?'' Nobody answered him. One or two men had already dozed off.
In a little while, as soon as the MPs came to take the prisoners down the line, the men who had captured them would be going back to the front, but that little while was full of long, big, juicy minutes. The choice of relaxations in front of the men was unlimited: they could wash, shave, talk, or go to sleep in the sun. Two bearded, grimy characters, who hadn't slept for three days, wavered between sleep and a shave, and ended up with a bath and a shave out of a helmet. Another man got his shoes and stockings off and flexed his toes, and his mouth curved up in a big, slow grin.

Sgt. Meadows and Pfc. Melvin E. Preston, of Richmond, Calif., a good-looking lad through the streaks of mud along his jaws, talked about this morning's fighting and their weapons as against the enemy's. They didn't think much of the German machinegun pistol, nor of the German sharp-shooting in this vicinity. They thought the machinegun pistol was inaccurate after a few rounds and the barrel burned out too quickly. Our fragmentation and phosphorus grenades were very good, but Meadows said in his soft voice that he didn't give a damn for our concussion grenade. Only last night he had come on a German doing his duty under a tree and had thrown a concussion grenade straight at the man. The German, Meadows said, flew into the air after the explosion, but came down running and took off through the woods while pulling his pants up.

“But their 88s,” said Preston, “that thing scares (the) hell out of you. Anyway, our 81 scares (the) hell out of them."

The minutes were ticking away. Soon they'd be back in action? Though none of them would have said he was anxious for the action, still they all fretted in the way of soldiers who are separated from their company and know that they should be with it. They hated the front, but that aggregate known as the company was up there and they had to find the company and that was all there was to it.

An MP Captain came into the clearing and said there would soon be vehicles for the prisoners. The captain and Preston the infantry Pfc. got into a discussion about front-line action. Preston's platoon leader had been killed the day before while advancing over open ground and Preston said angrily that his lieutenant had been a brave man but was he a good soldier, advancing over open ground like that ? Was he supposed to follow the lieutenant, even if he knew for sure they wouldn't get anywhere except killed?

The MP Captain, whose name was Louis Sohn, Jr., and who hails from Atlanta, Ga., had been an infantry officer and didn't agree with Preston. "You have to advance," said the captain. "You have to make the Jerry understand that you'll keep coming in. Otherwise everything piles up, your materiel, your men, are all piled up all the way into the rear.I know that you're the guy who has to do it and I'm the guy who's talking, but I know that you have to advance. Your lieutenant was right and you weren't."

“I'll go somewhere but you've got to feel it'll get you somewhere," said Preston stubbornly. “I want to know that it gets something, that's all.”

There was the sudden whining of the 88s overhead. Everybody dived into ditches and foxholes, everybody, that is, except the prisoners and their guards, who stayed in the middle of the clearing, flat on their stomachs. You could hear that strange whining sound, like a huge mosquito around your ear, and you could only lie there and hope the big mosquito wouldn't bite you with his big steel bite, and then the whining died away and up popped Capt. Sohn and called to Preston in the next foxhole: “You have to advance, that's all.”

"I want to know that it means something, not only getting killed but something gained at the same time," said Preston.

The infantrymen who had brought the prisoners in were ready to go back to the line. Some more prisoners were brought in, two very frightened young French lads who had been found around the front. The boys talked very rapidly to the interrogator-sergeant. "I guess you might as well bring them down too," he said to an MP. "After all, they do live in this country and they say they had friends up there and were visiting their friends.''

The soldiers stared non-committally at the young Frenchmen. A young Yugoslav prisoner, at last found somebody who could talk his language and explained that when he got home he would kill Germans. By the way he swung his arms, the idea seemed to be that he wanted to hunt and kill Germans every day and twice on Sundays and that this was all he wanted to do. But this didn't excite the infantrymen, either. Neither the languages nor the statements nor the geography meant anything to them; all they knew was that they were in the line and they had to find their company.

The soldiers who were sleeping got up and rubbed their eyes. Only a boy from New Jersey, a boy called "Jersey,'' kept lying on the ground. He said, " When you're on your feet and fighting you don't even know what it is to be tired. You never think of it. The minute you lie down you can't get up any more. How much longer are they gonna keep us in the line?"

“I reckon a few more days," said Sgt. Meadows.

"I wonder if I'll live that long," said Jersey. And he said it without gloom and without worry, but only in a tone of speculation—the way you might wonder if your horse was going to win that afternoon.

“Well, let's get back," said Preston. “Our boys are moving up and we don't know where to find them.”

“Just a couple of seconds more," said Jersey.

He lay there in the grass, tired but alive. He was a trained, toughened young soldier from New Jersey, resting in the thick grass: And his friends stood around him, giving him a few seconds more in the sun before they went back to the line.

Rangers Come Home

2009-08-07T13:46:00.000-07:00

Rangers Come Home

By Sgt. Mack Morris

Yank Staff Writer

Camp Butner, N. C.--Frankie was reclining on his bunk.

Another Ranger drifted over rather aimlessly, observed that liquor and women are fine American institutions and then corked Frankie smartly on the arm. The smack of fist against shoulder was sharp in the still barracks.

Frankie lay there and swore long enough to give the guy a head start. Then he casually rolled off his sack, picked up a GI shoe and hurled it the length of the room at the retreating Ranger. The shoe hit a fire extinguisher and dented it.

Frankie settled back on the bunk, grunted, smacked lazily at a fly; and went to sleep. His target went down the stairs without looking back. The other Rangers in the squad room, resting or writing, didn't look up. The shoe lay where it fell and the fire extinguisher ceased reverberating.
The Rangers, those few who were left of the old 1st and 3d and 4th Battalions, were back in the States.

Most of them had been overseas two years and more, and all of them saw action enough to add up to eight solid months of continuous fighting. They went home on furlough and talked about the war, then reported in to Camp Butner and talked about it some more. Pretty soon they were weary of hacking their gums. So they answered the questions they were asked in public, and then in the barracks they swore rippling oaths at each other land wrestled and spoke gently to the dice and made themselves at home.

The Rangers are an independent bunch, and it was that yearning for freedom of action that appealed to most of the men who volunteered in June 1942 in North Ireland. The Rangers offered them a rugged future, but at least a man could call his soul his own. "I joined this outfit," said T-5 Clyde Thompson of Ashland, Ky., "because they sent out a letter saying they wanted men to work in little groups that would hit and run. Well, we hit more'n we run, but I'm satisfied, they kept most of their promises, and we were on our own most of the time."

The Rangers spearheaded every Allied invasion in the Mediterranean. Being shock troops got in their blood. One of them, who will remain anonymous here so that his rough-riding outfit won't ride him for it, let himself go: “There was just one thing about that kind of fighting—by damn, it gave you a thrill. We never had to ask no questions about who was out front; we just started shooting. Hell, nobody wants to get killed and I was plenty scared sometimes—but it gave you a thrill, the way we fought."

Perhaps it was because they found a certain fascination in combat that the Rangers had remarkably few cases of psychoneurosis, although, as an Irish first sergeant put it: "Sometimes, when you were under it, that Jerry artillery made you want to cry."

The original outfit, the 1st Ranger Battalion, was activated in North Ireland on June 19,1942, with 600 men selected from more than 2,000 soldiers who had volunteered. Their training was in Scotland, and they had more casualties there than they had on their first African landing. The British Commandos were their instructors.

Those bastards tried to kill us, or we thought they did," said Thompson. "We maneuvered with live ammunition. There were accidents, too, that sort of went with it. They had us out in a place one time that still wasn't entirely cleared of old land mines they'd put there when invasion was expected. Two of our boys jumped a barbed-wire -fence and landed right on top of a mine. We were picking them up two days later. Another guy fell off a cliff and broke practically every bone in his body."

Then, on Aug. 18, came Dieppe. While it was predominantly a Canadian show, a small party of Rangers were in on the deal. A few of them got into the fight. Others were intercepted by German E-boats and never got ashore.

But less than three months later the long series of combat operations began in which the Rangers as a whole spearheaded drive after drive across Africa through Sicily to Italy. On Nov. 8, 1942, the Rangers landed at Arzew, 30 miles east of Oran. Their mission was to seize four coastal guns overlooking the town and two others guarding the approaches to the harbor.
The attack began at 0130 when four companies landed three miles above the town and came in from the rear to take the French defenders by surprise. Two other companies came through the jetties, where they were met by machine-gun fire, but their element of surprise was so great that a small fort and the two remaining coastal guns were taken with a minimum of casualties.
Three hours after the initial landing, the CO--Col. William O. Darby of Fort Smith, Ark.—fired success flares and the central task force of the African invasion came ashore.

"We went into a garrison and got them Frenchmen out of bed," grinned one Ranger reflectively. D-plus-two saw a Ranger company lend a hand to the 1st Division at St. Cloud; after eight hours, the break-through came, paving the way to Oran.

The Rangers, no longer needed, resumed combat training for three months. Then, on Feb. 7, 1943, they were suddenly ordered into transport planes and flown to the Tunisian front, mission unknown. They were landed at a front-line airport and three days later moved into Gafsa, which already had changed hands several times.

Sgt. Sherman Legg of Handley, W. Va., was on the point approximately 1,000 yards ahead of the Ranger advance party. He was riding a motorcycle and was armed with a tommy gun.
"It was my job to find out who was out there and where they were. It could have been Germans in front of us and it could have been Frenchies. I didn't know what to expect. Anyway, I was moving along and I saw this figure, dark like, over in the ditch, so I jumped over on him and threw my tommmy gun into his back. He let out a yell and turned around. You know the first thing he said when he saw I was an American? He said: 'Cigarette, comrade?' So I knew it was all right. I knew he was a Frenchman."

Two days after entering Gafsa, the Rangers pulled what will always be their favorite action. Back in the States now they talk about it fondly, the way advertising men might discuss a beautiful sales-promotion job. This was the Sened Station raid or the “AEF raid"—so-called because those three companies were in on it. It was the kind of thing they were most schooled in.
Their mission was to destroy a fortified position. They entrucked at night and rode 18 miles to a French outpost and then marched cross country for 12 more miles. By dawn they were holed up in the saddle off a mountain overlooking an enemy position five miles northwest of Sened. All day, covered by shelter halves and natural camouflage, they watched proceedings at the outpost four miles away.

When darkness came, they moved forward. Around midnight, 600 yards away from their objective, they went into a skirmish line on a battalion front. When they were 200 yards away, the outposted enemy, sensing that something was out in front of them, opened fire. The Rangers continued forward without firing a shot. Then, within 50 yards of their objective, they assaulted. For 20 minutes they worked with bayonet and
tommy gun and rifle and grenade, and then it was over. By dawn they were back at the French outpost, their starting point.

Almost every Ranger who was there has a favorite tale about the 20 minutes at Sened :
“This was the kind of stuff we loved to do--coming in under their fire which sometimes wasn't a foot and a half over our heads but knowing damn well those Ities didn't know where we were. We could watch their gun flashes when we got close enough.". , . "The Ities called us 'Black Death' after that, on account of our work was at night." …"I remember watching a motor pool, and this Itie ran out and tried to get away on a motorcycle. We were laying down a mortar concentration on the motor pool and this guy got the cycle started all right and was about to get out, and just then a 60-mm hit right on top of him, and he just disappeared.". . . "There was some pretty rough in-fighting there."

When the Germans attacked at Kasserine Pass, threatening Gafsa from the east, U. S. forces withdrew to Feriana and from there to Dernia Pass, which was threatened by a German push aimed at Tebessa, the main Allied base. For three weeks the Rangers sat at Dernia waiting for the big drive that never came.

"Our work,' said one Ranger, "was mostly knocking off stray German vehicles that either blundered into the Pass by mistake or were nosing around to find out if we were still there. There wasn't any real rough stuff. Funny thing about how those people would roam around. We hit a car one day and captured an Italian officer. He was a pilot, and said he was just out sightseeing."

After Dernia the outfit drew back for a rest and then went back into action by leading the American drive back through Feriana and into Gafsa again. There wasn't too much trouble that time either, but then came El Guettar. There they had another job they liked. Beyond El Guettar was a pass leading to Sfax that the Germans and Italians had defended. It was the Rangers' mission to clean up the defended ridges, which commanded a dominating position over the surrounding terrain.

Cpl. Robert M. Bevan of Estherville, Iowa a sniper throughout the African campaigns, scored his longest accurate shooting there when he silenced a, machine-gun nest at 1,350 yards.
"We came up on them by a circular route of about 10 miles and hit them from behind and above, working our way down to where we could use a bayonet. This set-up was Italian EM with German officers. There was some bayonet fighting.

"As a sniper I picked targets that were out of range for the riflemen, so I started working on this machine-gun nest. I was using our sniper rifle--a: plain old '03 with telescopic sights. I ranged in with tracers and then put two shots right into the position. The gun was quiet for a couple of minutes, and then a crazy thing happened. Somebody threw a dirty towel over the gun, and then the crew came out and sat down."

After El Guettar the Rangers pulled back to Nemours, on the coast of Algeria. The 1st Battalion was split into three groups to cadre a reorganized 1st Battalion and the new 3d and 4th Battalions, which were formed there.

Then, on July 9, 1943, the 1st and 4th landed at Gela and the 3d at Licata in Sicily. From then on, the war got progressively tougher for the Rangers.

The Gela landings were made at night, and searchlights picked up the incoming landing craft when they were still a mile out. There were pillboxes and land mines ashore, but by 1000 hours the town itself was in Ranger hands. At 1100 the fun began.

It was then that “we thought we'd have to grab the lifeboats.” With only the two battalions of Rangers in Gela, Italian tanks came barreling into town, blasting. "We fought them from the rooftops by dropping TNT and sticky bombs on them. We had a 37-mm that shuttled to its targets, going from one corner to another, taking potshots at them as they came in from different directions. Our bazookas were firing point-blank.”

1st Sgt. David (Soupy) Campbell of Medford, Mass., and 1st Sgt. Vincent Egan of Staten Island, N.Y., both had some hard fighting and some laughs to remember. "We were using bazookas then, and I’ll never forget the trouble one guy had with one," grinned Soupy, “He was firing from inside a house, and this tank was right up on him; so he hauled down on the thing point-blank—and missed. I don't see how he did. And the backfire off the thing! The guy did more damage to the wall behind him than he did to the tank in front.”

"I remember another thing there. We had this young kid with us who hadn't been in the outfit so long, and he was really dying to get into a fight. So he was coming along a wall and when he turned a corner he ran smack into a Jerry. The kid was so shocked he didn't know what to do. So the Jerry shot him, right through the chest. One of our guys across the street got the Jerry, but it was too late to help the kid."

"We finally got rid of the Ities," said Egan, "but the next day came worse trouble—or it might have been. We looked out and saw 18 big Tigers (PzKW VIs) coming in. Between fire from our cruisers offshore and fire from a chemical outfit's new 4.2 mortars, 12 of the Jerry tanks were knocked out and the others quit. It was the first time those 4.2 mortars were in action, and they did damn well."

It was on that first day at Gela that Sherman Legg had his troubles, too. He had parked his motorcycle in an alleyway and was leaning against the opposite wall, just waiting for developments. Developments arrived in the form of a shell that blew his motor upside down and blew Legg back through the alley, through an open door and into a building. He was knocked out. After a while he came to, went back to his motor and found it would still run.
“l got on the thing, land this guy across the street stuck his head out. I thought he looked sort of funny. 'Hey; Legg’ he yelled, 'ain't you hurt?' I asked him what did he think. He said he didn't think I was hurt, he thought I was dead. He'd seen me standing there, and then the shell hit and he didn't see me any more.”

Earlier that same morning Legg accomplished in actual fact what has been done very rarely anywhere except in the movies. He shot down a Messerschmitt-110 with a BAR.

“I was on the beach right near a wall when this bastard came over, strafing. He scared me silly. I ducked behind the wall, and he came back. I let fly at him and missed, but I found out why I missed. So the next time he came in, I put the gun on the wall and held it there and he flew right into my fire. I could see the bullets rake him. He went along a little farther, and then I saw flames coming out around the gas tanks where I'd hit. He crashed into the sea."

The Rangers spearheaded the way across the Plain of Gela toward Butera, a 4,000-foot citadel "that looked like a castle sitting up there,” One Ranger company cleared it.

T/Sgt. Francis P. Padrucco of Miami, Fla., then a buck sergeant acting as platoon sergeant, had 20 men who were part of the outfit that went straight up the long road leading to the citadel itself. It was a brash maneuver, coming flush up the obvious approach, at 2300 hours.

"We got to a bend in the road and a machine gunner opened up on us at a range of about 20 feet. He wounded my lieutenant and the radio operator. But our scout, with a tommy gun,let go with a whole drum of ammo; he got seven.”

"The platoon killed about 15 and took 60 or 70 prisoners. We got a bunch of A-T guns by surprise, and some flame-thrower people. The whole thing took about 20 minutes.

"Here again it was German officers and Italian personnel. This time some German, farther back, was giving orders to two Italian officers, a colonel and a lieutenant. The Italians wanted to surrender, and the German told them to keep fighting. We told them to give up or we'd kill them. The German told them if they made a move to surrender, he'd kill them.”

“Poor devils. They got killed. We chased the Jerry, butt he got away."

Paddy, for his work that night after his officer was out of action, got the Silver Star. The Rangers moved by different routes to the northeast side of Sicily. When the campaign ended, they pulled back for training and replacements.

On Sept. 9, they landed in Italy. The landings were above Salerno, and the 4th fanned out in opposite directions toward Salerno to the east and Sorrento to the west. The 1st followed and drove to the high ground overlooking the Plain of Naples. The 3d fought at Chiunzi Pass. The Rangers held the left hinge of the beachhead against every German attempt to close in and knock U. S. forces back into the sea. For 22 days they had nothing but counterattacks, it was rough work, but the Salerno sector was rough work for everybody.

T-4 Frankie Ziola of South Amboy, N. J.—the man who throws shoes—was one of four cooks in his outfit at Chiunzi Pass who volunteered for duty as litter-bearers. He spent 18 days bringing out the wounded and was awarded the Silver Star when the fight was over.

“They asked for volunteers for that detail, so we volunteered. I got me an Italian as a helper, and the two of us would go up and pull the guys out when they got hit and take them back to Battalion Aid. I didn't know anything about medicine - or first aid or anything, but I damn sure learned. Funny thing about those Rangers when they were wounded. Almost every time the first thing they wanted was a cigarette.”

Finally, with enemy counterattacks broken, the Rangers spearheaded the way into the Valley of Naples and relieving, forces, went on into Naples itself. The Rangers pulled back again to train. Their hardest fighting was still ahead.

On Nov. l the Fifth Army encountered strong opposition at Venafro, about 40 miles above Naples. On Nov. 3 the Rangers began a 35-day fight that was to open the way to the valley leading to Cassino. That day they crossed the winding Volturno River with the mission of infiltrating six miles behind enemy lines and taking the heights commanding the road to San Pietro.

They marched all night, passing enemy f outposts, and at dawn were still undetected. They attacked, seized the enemy positions and held them for two days. Then, with their supplies gone, they came back through the enemy again to Sesto Campano. Then they moved f toward Venafro. When they were through, the Rangers had advanced the lines by 12 miles.

T/Sgt. Robert O. Johnson of Shinnston, W. Va., a battalion communications sergeant, was wounded at Venafro when a shell blasted him down as he and his lieutenant were carrying a wounded man to shelter. It was in that sector that communication maintenance became a matter of survival.

“I had 22 men in my section," said Johnson, "and before we were through there, the battalion communications was being handled by only the lieutenant, a maintenance man and myself. The other 19 were knocked out by either mortar or artillery fire. I almost got it good there. I had to go two miles up Venafro Mountain checking telephones, and the whole way I had mortar fire right in my hip pocket."

After Venafro the Rangers were pulled out for a little more than a month and on Jan. 22 they went into Anzio.

"We were 66 days on the beach at Anzio," said Egan. "It was rough. We attacked a red farm on the left flank at Carroceto. Finally there were only four men left, and they took the place.”

Sherman Legg, still on his motor, had another close one there: "I was going along without paying much attention where I was, and I came over the brow of this hill and a machine gun let loose on me. I guess the Jerries were excited because I don't see how they missed. Anyway I threw the motor over on the ground, spun it and started the hell out of there. I was afraid even to duck, because I might duck right into a bullet. I'm glad they were lousy gunners, or I wouldn't be here. As it was, I made sure not to take any more wrong roads around there."

Soupy Campbell likes to talk about the Ranger mortar concentrations at Anzio. “There was one time we saw this German come out of his foxhole for a minute, so we gave him concentration No. 3 (we had everything zeroed in). He must have had some ammo in that hole because the next thing we saw of that Jerry he was about 20 feet in the air turning end over end."

Soupy grinned. "We had things to laugh at even at Anzio. There was that machine gunner on our flank who'd clear his gun every morning just about dawn. He always did it to start the day off right. ‘Shave ‘n’ a haircut—two bits,’ he'd play on that thing.”

Then, on Jan. 29, disaster struck. The 1st and 3d Battalions were to attack and take the town of Cisterna, while the 4th was to support their assault. But something went wrong: the Germans had reinforced their positions and when the Rangers struck at dawn, they hit a force that overwhelmed them. Two battalions went into Cisterna; 26 Rangers came out.

Sgt. Milton Lehman, Stars and Stripes correspondent, wrote the story as it was reconstructed for him by survivors: “When the sun came up, the Rangers were surrounded. Between sunrise and 0700 hours, when radio silence, was broken, the Rangers knew that the battle was lost. Sunrise doomed them and marked the beginning of the hopeless, heroic fight. . . . The sand was running out in the hour glass. The Rangers knew it and the Germans knew it. Slowly and bitterly the last orders were given by the company commanders .. . the tall, bespectacled, thin-faced West Pointer telling his men to go. 'I hate to do this’ the captain said, 'but' it's too late now. That direction is south. Take out, and God bless you.’ ”

The 4th Battalion, also stopped but not decimated, fought on after Cisterna and, with the few survivors of the 1st and 3d, came back to the States as a unit. They have friends among the newer Ranger outfits now in France.

But the Old Rangers are out of action.

GUN NO. 3

2009-08-03T17:43:00.000-07:00

GUN NO. 3

By Sgt. BILL DAVIDSON,
YANK Staff Correspondent

Normandy—Gun Number Three of D Battery was a slim, graceful piece of 90-mm. rapid-firing anti-aircraft mechanism, with an electrical brain so keen and exacting that the men of her crew respectfully called her "Ike," after the Supreme Commander. She was a queen among artillery weapons and looked it. Her 90-mm. shells fired at planes in the air and against tanks, pillboxes or gun emplacements on the ground with crushing authority. Yet there was something delicate and feminine about her, unlike the sturdy sweating, muddy 105 and 155-mm. workhorses at the front.

There was genuine affection between Ike and her crew. They had been together for a long time. Up here, just behind the front, the men never left her night or day, and during their waking hours, spent most of their time ministering to Ike with ramrod, bore brush and some high octane gasoline they had managed to swipe somewhere. Ike, on her part, returned small favors to the men, such as supplying, 110 volts of electricity for the radio so that it could be heard during the long, lonely hours of the night.

Ike and her crew came ashore on D plus 3, so they missed out on the 24 hours of genuine glory which came to the ack-ack men on D-Day down on the bloody First Division beach. But they all took justifiable pride in it just the same. On D-Day, two battalions of light ack-ack (40-mm. Bofors guns and.50-calibre single and multiple machine guns) came right in with the infantry. They set up on the beach to fend off the Luftwaffe. But no Luftwaffe came that day. Instead, German 20-mm. guns in pillboxes on the high ground just behind the beach played havoc with our landing craft, whipping shells into the boats the moment the ramps were lowered. So the 40-mm. ack-ack depressed to zero and went to work on the pillboxes like field artillery. Half of each of the light ack-ack battalions was wiped out, but after a long duel, the pillboxes were wiped out, too. Fewer doughboys died after that, working their way in to the beach.

The enemy's heavier artillery and tank guns further back were still causing considerable damage, however. By that time, two battalions of 90-mm. ack-ack were ashore—slim, delicate, expensive guns like Ike. It was the same as using a fine scalpel to open a can of sardines, but the 90s, too, fired over open sights, engaging their opposite numbers, the German 88s, for the first time in the west. It was a bitter skirmish, but our ack-ack won finally. General Bradley later credited the 90s with breaking up three enemy tank attacks. For many precious hours, the ack-ack was the only artillery we had on the beach. All this time a Brigadier General, commander of the ack-ack brigade, was nothing less than heroic on the beach. His tall, broad-shouldered, white-thatched figure went storming about among the shell-bursts, personally commanding the batteries and urging the infantry forward from the shelf of the beach. Once, he even wandered out up to his armpits in the water--disregarding the mines and obstacles--to jockey in three landing craft loaded with self-propelled guns.

Ike and her crew had no part in all this, but their life hadn't been exactly unexciting since they dug into their picturesque French cow-pasture to protect a vital air strip on their left and a division or two of infantry on their right. The men fought snipers along the hedgerows with carbines and hand grenades. They captured a prisoner. They were strafed and bombed by a Stuka that managed to sneak in over the tops of the apple trees. And Ike fired several hundred rounds at the enemy—60 in a single night—sharing in the destruction of an unknown number of enemy planes, and claiming four for her own.

They went to sleep in the morning when everyone else was getting up; that is, after D plus 9, prior to which they didn't sleep much at all. On D plus 6, they and the other 90s burned Jerry so badly that he didn't come back in strength again. Their working day began at sunset, when the patrolling fighters came home to rest under their protective canopy.

The sunset of this particular working day for Ike and her crew was a beautiful one.

The sun went down, red and orange, behind the poplars of the hedgerow that sheltered Battery S-2 and S-3 dugout and the deep slit trench of the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Pat Guinjpy, who once was a better-than-fair basketball forward and Plebe coach at West Point.

Ike's crew carefully removed the camouflage netting and lifted her nose to the sky. The same thing happened to the other 90s and auxiliary light guns of the battery, and in a matter of minutes, the peaceful French pasture was converted into a labyrinth of trenches and dugouts, literally bristling with weapons. A herd of white-faced cattle passed through the field on their way to bed down for the night, and right next to Ike, a handsome, gray, ex-artillery horse left behind by the Germans, kept on grazing.

It grew dark slowly. In the half-light of dusk, the battery's gun mechanic, Sgt. James Sporter, of Georgetown, Louisiana, came over to take one last look at Ike, He carefully inspected her breech mechanism and daubed about with a screwdriver. Then he patted Ike affectionately on the rump.

Ike's gun commander, Sgt. Lewis Siegel, of Brooklyn, came over anxiously. “Anything wrong?" he asked.

"Nope," said Sporter. He grinned and walked away.

But Siegel wasn't convinced. He called for a test. Ike swung round and focused on a Mustang casually passing at 300 miles an hour and at 6,000 feet. Siegel opened the breech and, crouching down, looked straight up the barrel. The Mustang was caught perfectly in a set of cross hairs placed across the muzzle of the gun. The Mustang stayed there.

"Okay," said Siegel. He closed the breech.

It was dark now. Ike's crew lay stretched out in their slit trenches around the gun. They were listening to their radio. Two members of the crew, Pvt. Loren Christman, of Fresno, California, and Pfc. Lawrence Jappe, of Big Sandy, Montana, were on guard on the gun platform, which was partially underground and ringed solidly with sandbags. Both Christman and Jappe had been ranch hands before the war, and they stood there leaning on the sandbags, professionally studying the sturdy French cattle.

“I wouldn't like to handle them babies at branding time," said Jappe.

"Yep," said Christman, and his attention shifted to the far end of the field. He was looking at the scraggly green apples on the trees, and thinking of the Sacramento Valley at this time of the year.

The BBC had closed down for the night, so the rest of the crew was listening to Dirty Gertie on the German's Radio Calais. "You are dying in Normandy by the thousands," said Dirty Gertie, “so that the Jews back home can dominate Europe."

“Turn that crap off," said Pfc. Lewis Gappae, who used to be a street car motorman in Denver.

‘Leave her alone,'' said Siegel.

“She’s only good for five minutes, and then they play music again. ” Siegel was a quiet, authoritative little guy in his middle thirties, who had kicked around from one job to another in New York. He had a thin moustache, and for a good number of years he had driven a taxi around Flatbush Avenue.

He rolled over and carefully removed a hard lump of earth which had wedged itself between his back and the floor of his slit trench. He looked up at the sky. “Good night for Jerry” he said. Scattered clouds were rolling in over the horizon. There was no moon. Just then, on the horizon, beautiful red
tracers arched up from a .50--caliber machine gun. Immediately, the sky was filled with thousands of red tracers and the slower, more deliberate 40--mm. flashes. It was ten times more impressive than any Fourth of July celebration. There was a solid dome of moving red lines all over the sky. “Trigger-happy bastards,” said Siegel. “One of them thinks he sees something and starts firing, and all the rest open up.” He yawned and turned over on his side. In a few minutes the firing subsided.

The night wore on. In a computing van, rolled into a dugout scooped out for them by the engineers, C/4 Albeit Duschka, of Tecumseh, Nebraska, and Pfc. Reuben Shlafmitz, of New York City, sat at the controls. Over in a corner, under another light, their relief, Cpl. John Werner, of Madison, Wisconsin, was reading a pocket edition of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

The battery CP was dark and quiet, but over in the sealed air-conditioned computing van, Col. Guiney was writing a letter to his wife, and Lt. James Spencer, of Weathersfield, Conn., and S/Sgt. Fred Pluhar, of Glasgow, Montana, were dosing. After a while, Pluhar went out and came back with a pot of boiling water he had heated on the exhaust of the generator. We all had coffee, with cheese and jam spread on K-ration biscuits. Then the colonel went out to look over the gun crews.

On Gun Number Three, Pfc. George Andrews, of Paso Robles, California, was on guard, with Pfc. Howard Louie, a young Chinese high school boy, from San Francisco. They were arguing quietly about a poker game they had had the day before. Louie was by far the best poker player in the crew.

“If this keeps up,” complained Andrews in the darkness of the gun pit, “you'll be owning half the chop suey joints in San Francisco.”

Over in the slit trenches, the Jerry radio station had gone off the air, and Pfc. Pete Radonich, of Anaconda, Montana, and Pfc. J. W. Nolan Smith, of Stockton, California, were discussing the relative shortstop merits of Joe Holey and Leo Durocher. Finally, they called on Cpl. Jerry Gardner for a decision. Powerful, 22-year-old Gardner had played catcher for the Sacramento Senators in the Pacific Coast League, and was on his way up to the Saint Louis Cardinals before the Army grabbed him. “I don't know," said Gardner. He adjusted his gas mask under his head and went back to sleep.

Suddenly, an electric spark leaped through the outfit.

"On target,” said Duschka.

“On target,'' repeated Shlafmitz.

The message went by telephone to the CP and all parts of the battery. Schlafmitz worked furiously.

"Lock," said Schlafmitz.

"Lock," said Duschka.

Thousands of volts of electricity passed through hundreds of amplifiers in the computing van, automatically calculating ponderous mathematical equations. On top of the computer cabinet rested a photograph of Lt. Spencer's wife. Into the computer went the pertinent information—the height, distance and direction of the enemy plane. Out of the computer came all the corrections—wind velocity, the speed of the plane, height, weather, even the distance of the battery's guns from the computing van. In this way, the fuse length and the amount of lead necessary for the guns to take on the target was calculated to the fraction of an inch. That is, if the target came within range.

The target came within range.

The telephone rang at Gun Number Three. Siegel answered it. "Action stations," said the voice on the other end of the line. The voice belonged to Capt. John De Master, the battery commander, speaking from the CP.

"Action stations!" yelled Siegel, and the men scrambled out of their slit trenches. In ten seconds, they were over next to Ike, looking up at the sky.

Siegel hung on to the telephone. “Stand by," said the voice.

"Stand by," said Siegel.

Cpl. Billy Noble, the gunner, of Somerton, Arizona, nervously fingered Ike's trigger. Gardner, the ammunition corporal, frantically checked the ammunition, even though he knew the position of every shell by heart.

“Target," said the voice on-the phone.

"Target," said Siegel.

Noble flicked a switch, and Ike swung into remote control, automatically leading the enemy plane.

"Right between the eyes now, baby," said Siegel to Ike.

The voice on the phone spoke again, “Five rounds," it said.

“Five rounds," said Siegel.

“Load," said the voice.

"Load," said Siegel.

A heavy shell whipped out from under the sandbags and passed from Gardner to Radonich to Louie to Smith to Jappe to Gappae to Andrews to Ike. Andrews, the loader, slapped the shell into the fusecutter and then into the breech.

"Fire,” said the voice on the phone.

"Fire," said Siegel.

Andrews pulled the trigger, and a tremendous wave of blast stopped our ears and sent us reeling back against the sandbags. Five times the pit became bathed in orange light as if a huge neon sign were being turned on and off. Each time, Ike kicked back furiously, like Henry Armstrong bouncing off the ropes in a rally. A cluster of tiny orange specks popped suddenly in one section of the sky.

"Cease fire," said Siegel.

The men sprang erect and stared at the sky.

All the specks disappeared except one. That remained and suddenly grew larger. Then there was a big golden-orange flash. The flash disintegrated into a series of individual fires which drifted slowly to the earth like so many tired comets. Everyone watched the fires without saying a word. The fires hit the ground miles away. The men chattered all at once, and lit up cigarettes.

"You got yourself a flamer, baby," Siegel said to Ike.

“A flamer,” explained Gardner, “is a bomber that gets hit while it's still carrying its bombs.”

We noticed for the first time that dawn was beginning to break in the east.

It grew light slowly, and the eastern horizon became pink-hued. The men relaxed, but stayed close to the gun. Off in the next field, a fighter plane began to warm up. The men stretched and yawned.

"Now we get ready to go to bed, baby,'' Siegel said to Ike. He assigned Louie and Jappe the job of giving Ike her daily cleaning. The other men wandered back to their slit trenches, They crawled in and pulled their blankets over their heads to shut out the light.

Then the sun came up, and Ike sank back from her position of attention to rest.

Taking La Haye du Puits - part 2

2009-08-01T13:33:00.000-07:00

The People in the Town

By Sgt. SAUL LEVITT YANK Staff Correspondent

La Haye du Puits—Americans are pushing south, and where the Germans have made a stand there are ghost towns. The men call it “cowboy and Indian fighting,” and one young captain calls it a “chicken shit” war, not because it is a small war but because it has been scattered dueling of riflemen and small arms backed up on both sides by artillery lobbing. It takes place in the rolling wooded hill country of the Cherbourg peninsula, along the hedgerows and the back country roads. And even after the direct front fighting moves on, the snipers and the mines remain, and their presence stays oppressively in the atmosphere like poison gas.

In one of the corridors of that southward push through northern France is La Haye du Puits. The fluid line of the “cowboy and Indian war” is now a few miles past this town. But the German guns occasionally lob shells in, and one or two of their planes like to drop over at night to strafe and scatter a few bombs. There are lots of store-front signs and house number plates, but there are no stores and no houses behind all this printing. The groceries, drugs, hardware and draperies announced by the signs are no longer true. La Haye du Puits is a bad check; you simply can't cash in on this town.

Today is sunny as you drive through, going south toward the firing. For the military, however, the sun simply means lots of dust on the roads and better observation for the artillery. A civilian photographer pushes through the rubble of a store and finds an old postcard of the town—the kind of postcard you used to send home from a vacation place with the note, "Wish you were here." It was a pretty little place once, and the photographer thinks that the old postcard will provide quite a contrast to the shot of the town he is going to take now.

The shells of opposing armies are atheists; they have gotten the church here, too. However, the shells have discriminated in favor of the pissoir which is still standing in the center of the mountains of rubble and crumbled walls.

Overhead fly the slow-droning, slow-travelling artillery observation planes. Anti-aircraft stuff suddenly goes off sharply and it seems to be right under you. Military traffic pours on and weaving through it are the homecoming French. They keep cominginto La Haye du Puits with that special deep tenacitywhich brings people back home again everywhere. They must say to themselves that in this bingo game of war it is possible that my house is still standing while yours is gone. And after that illusion is broken, then the MPs, together with the Civil Affairs people, midwife the homeless through “channels” into habitations and food.

GI American high school French assaults the native ear everywhere. A big party of people is being moved off to what was once a German Army barracks. They are mostly women and children and a few old men. One of the women assaults a T/5 with a barrage of questions and he comes back very slowly so that you can almost see him figuring out the future tense of the verb aller. It seems that the woman's husband is working all day and how will he know where to find her in the evening? It has beenarranged, explains the T/5, hitching his rifle uneasily along his shoulder. Then one of the old men asks something about the American operations in this vicinity. Apparently, he wants us to make sure our arms will avoid some spot he regards as especially important. The T/5 explains to monsieur old man that in this matter the monsieur will have to speak to the General. “They think every soldier they see runs the show,” says the T/5 cheerfully.

Down through the center of this ghost town strolls an MP captain, a highly-intelligent, good-looking young officer from Atlanta named Louis Sohn, Jr., whose eye hasn't missed much in La Haye du Puits. He says: " The French keep coming back here. While the fighting was on, they went off to the countryside. Now they're coming back. This morning there was a whole convoy of them along the side of the road, with kids, donkeys, old women, horses, wagons and wheel-barrows. The thing that got you was this one woman of 35 or so—a little woman—who was acting company commander of the whole deal. Whenever it broke down, or a kid cried, she was there. She urged them and wheeled them and yelled at them… Then there was an old man of 61 who insisted on being taken to his old home in town. Hell, we knew there was nothing left of it, except a couple of walls. When we took him there he just broke down and cried."

The captain said: “Don't get the idea that we're sentimental, but that old man bothered you. Anybody knows that an old man needs a house and a bed more than other people need them—that's all he needs. And then to top it off, this tough, nice little lady who had convoyed them all home, made a little speech to me, thanking the Americans for having liberated her town. It was an act and yet it really wasn't an act if you can see what I mean. All the people cheered when she made the speech. And she knew and I knew that there wasn't much of a town left, but she was thanking the Americans—and she meant it, too.”

“The Germans sent over a plane last night that did some strafing and dropped some bombs. It didn't kill anybody, but it's goddam aggravating,” the captain said, and he strolled down through the rubble and the dust of his domain, which is the ghost town of La Haye du Puits.

Moving Beyond the Town

South of La Haye Du Puits: When you leave behind the confused, strange web of soldiers, French civilians, bulldozers and rubble of the town, everything becomes simpler. Everything simplifies into the word War, which speaks in the single language of the guns. We move slowly southward now because the action here is a matter of yards of ground. The muddy road is shadowed by big trees and high hedges. The jeep gets into deep ruts and fights out again. Along the ditches you pass the yellow-green wax figures of the German dead awaiting burial. We go through a path into a small clearing. This is the unit CP with the foxholes, slit trenches and the more ambitious dugouts for switchboard and commander. On the edge of the clearing is the medical unit with ambulance, doctors and medics. A matter of hundreds of yards away, perhaps less, are snipers in the surrounding woods. An infantryman is brought in, shot through the leg by a sniper. The face of the infantry hereabouts is watchful, unemotional, flat and tired, but the mention of snipers always brings a quick cursing tide of anger.

In the middle of the clearing a demolition team of two men, Pfc. Stanley Morgan, of Poughkeepsie, New York, and Pvt. Thomas Bourke, of Baltimore, listen to a captain explain a couple of jobs to them. First, they are to probe for an unexploded 88 shell in the clearing which fell here last night. Then, they are to go forward to the ammunition dump.

Young Morgan is a boy with a fine, thin face. He is fully under control and completely aware of the danger. Bourke, the other half of the team is not quite as articulate, and he lets Morgan take the lead both in operations and in conversation. When the captain is through explaining the jobs to them, Morgan says without the slightest trace of self-pity, " I've got one of the unluckiest jobs in the Army.'' He gets over to the white taped square on the ground inside and under which is the unexploded shell. He moves toward it in a slow, unhurried stride like a man whose daily job it is to test an electric chair. When he gets over to the white-taped square he gets down on his knees and then stretches out until he's flat on his stomach and then he probes with his fingers for the shell. The dirt comes up in small puffs. Then he and Bourke look down for a moment, straighten up, and Morgan announces sardonically to no one in particular: "OK, gentlemen, it's a dud."

As the demolition team moves out of the clearing, Morgan turns his head and says very gravely to me: “Keep your noggin down.”

Two men are brought into the clearing on stretchers. They have been tagged for wounds and identification. They lie in the grass under the hedgerow, covered with blankets—wounded, alive, and quiet. One of them is ours, and the other is a young German of 18, who, before he closes his eyes to rest, announces: “My father is a prisoner of war, too.”

The doctor is Captain Abraham Jacob, of Brooklyn, New York, a husky, stocky, calm young man. The German, bandaged and in good shape, but moaning, lies on his stretcher, face turned to the side. He has a pair of big hands that clutch the grass. A soldier standing nearby says: “He ain't hurt that bad, but he's moaning like that because he thinks maybe we're going to kill him." A photographer bends over to take a picture. The German boy stiffens. “Probably thinks he's going to be shot,” says the nearby soldier. “One of them Hitler Youth babies—nasty stuff.”

Now the captain's fingers work up and down the back of the American very gently, and he says: "You'll-be all right, you're not hurt very bad at all." The soldier groans a little but the doctor is not too interested, for the mercy of Army medicine gives priority to the seriousness, not the pain of wounds. The American had been picked up on the road only a little while ago; he had been captured two days before by the Germans after being hit by shrapnel, and their doctors had taken care of him and then, when retreating, had left him lying on the road, so that he might be clearly seen by our advancing troops and picked up. This morning our men had picked up the wounded German—a Panzer SS Grenadier.

A medic came over and held the German's pulse and said: "He's OK." The soldiers around the clearing stared at everything uncritically and without any special emotion, except a flat, constant watchfulness. A stray bullet, perhaps a sniper bullet out of the nearby woods, whined by and everybody nose-dived to the ground. Again there was the cold whiff of anger across all faces. Then the medics got busy again; the K-ration boxes were opened. The slow observation planes were sailing across the sky. And wire chief S/Sgt. Miles D. Wright, a big, slow-talking soldier, from Syracuse, said: " We'll be packing up and moving some time today."

The unit was moving up. Along that strange cowboy and Indian front the push goes on, and the Army along this corridor of Northern France lifts its massive body of men and materiel, and moves on. Tomorrow this will be a quiet empty clearing, a small historic place through which American soldiers in France passed.

Taking of La Haye du Puits - part 1

2009-07-31T18:17:00.000-07:00

YANK 30 July 1944 British Edition

Taking La Haye du Puits

The fighting in the Town

By Sgt. Walter Peters

La Haye Du Puits, France—The G-2 colonel at corps headquarters told us that La Haye du Puits was successfully occupied this morning, so together with Jim McGlincy, of United Press, and Bill Stringer, of Reuters, I jumped into a jeep and headed for that town.

Actually, one would imagine that with the capture of a town practically all enemy hostilities there would cease. It didn’t work out that way in La Haye du Puits, just as it hasn’t in many other towns in Normandy.

The northern road to the town, which runs up and down like a Coney Island roller coaster, is pock-marked with holes from which our sappers dug mines planted by the Germans.
“Somebody said the Germans had thousands of pounds of TNT under here,” said McGlincey, as we passed over a bridge spanning a small creek.

We parked the jeep just outside of town where a number of GIs were standing by drinking cider, and from there the three of us walked on in.

The first sign of any American activity in the town itself was a notice on a telephone pole which read: “Off Limits to All Troops.” We saw nobody in front of us, and began to wonder whether or not our infantrymen had taken the notice seriously. Then as we walked along the road, stretching between wide open fields, shots came singing over our heads and the three of us dove head first into a ditch which was ankle deep with mud from a heavy rainfall.

“You guys better get the hell out of that ditch,” a sergeant, behind a bush across the road, yelled. “That side hasn’t been cleared of mines yet.”

We got out of the ditch in a hurry. Then another soldier came down the road with a tommygun in his hands.

“Where do you think the shots are coming from?” he asked us.

“From behind that tree, I think,” Stringer said, pointing.

“Give it a spray,” the sergeant behind the bush ordered the soldier.

The soldier left to “give it a spray.”

As we proceeded down the road there were more bursts of sniper fire, and the echo of shots from our infantrymen. At the railroad bridge we met more soldiers who said that their company command post was about three blocks further along. The soldiers explained that their battalion had entered the town that morning in a mopping-up mission.

The Americans had entered La Haye du Puits three times within a week, and had been forced to retreat each time. The fourth drive had succeeded and only needed mopping up to claim the final capture of the town.

From the railroad bridge we could see the skeleton of what once had been a beautiful town. As we reached the buildings we hugged them very closely so as not to provoke sniper fire. All the way to the command post, the buildings were a mass of ruins, no people were in sight and the only living creature was a cat walking out of a café where the cider barrels had been cracked open by artillery blasts.

At the CP, 1st/Sgt. Joseph O. Gunssauls, of Alexandrika, Va., was sitting behind a desk that only a few hours before had belonged to a German commander. In the back room, a bunch of GIs were eating K rations and trying to dry their clothing. The front windows of the command post were no longer there, the doors had been jarred loose from their hinges by our artillery, and one section of the ceiling had fallen to the floor—a pile of powdered rubble. Through the window frames came the smell of smoke and death—smoke from the burning American and German vehicles we had seen along the roads, and the smell of blood shed by our men who had fought their way into town and by the Germans who had opposed them.

Standing across from the first sergeant with a telephone in his hand was the company commander, Capt. Joseph Gray, of Hamilton, Ga.

“You came in at a historic time, gentlemen,” he said.

“Yeah, goddam historic,” said Pvt. Eugene Zubrzycki, of Flushing, L.I. “One of our guys just got a sniper who had shot his squad leader.”

The sniper’s bullet had hit the squad leader in the upper side of his chest and had gone through his arm. The assistant squad leader, Sgt. Hugh McCloskey, of Union City, N.J>, had spotted the sniper in a tree and had shot him with his M-1.

Rifle fire continued outside as we talked to the CO and his soldiers of the command post.
“I think there’s somebody still in that tower,” a soldier said. Pvt. Zubrzycdki looked through the window frames and read an advertising sign that was about the only object left in on piece on the building across the street.

“That sign says A. Ceron, Monuments, Funeraires et Mortuaires,” he read slowly, and pronouncing the French badly. “That guy ought to be making a lot of business. Monuments, flowers and funerals. Great racket. Lots of business.”

“Say, where the hell is Klotz?” somebody asked.

“Guess he’s out celebrating his baby,” another soldier answered.

That morning, just as his battalion had been ordered to mop up La Haye du Puits, Sgt. Syman Klotz, and assistant squad leader, from Brooklyn, had received a letter announcing the birth of a baby girl to his wife.

“Maybe he’s across the street at the wine shop,” another soldier suggested.

“Hell no,” the first replied. “There’s nothing left in there to celebrate with. He’s out looking for more snipers.”

Several bursts from German machine pistols were heard just then, followed by rifle fire.

It was now 1430 hours. Lt. Col. Earl Lerette, of Brookline, Mass., and his battalion, had entered the town at 0900 hours and small pockets of German snipers were still offering resistance.

On the way to the battalion command post I stopped inside a building where three soldiers were searching from room to room for snipers. Their names, they said, were: Pfc. Perron Rice, of Dotham, Ala.; Pfc. Claude Shepherd, of Pineville, Ore., and Pfc. Joseph Maex, of Taos, N. Mex.
There were blasts from German 88s and the mud near the railroad bridge where the shells were hitting flew high above the rubble that once was a town.

“There go the 88s.” said Maex. “And there probably goes a couple more dead GIs, I guess. Goddam those Germans.”

Colonel Lerette, sitting in an old house chair at battalion headquarters, was adjusting a kerosene lamp. Then, when he was through adjusting the lamp he took out his insignia of rank and started to pin them on his shoulders.

“We didn’t wear our insignia coming in,” said the colonel. “In fact, all the officers came in with full field packs looking the same as the GIs. Those snipers like to pick out the leaders.”
Shells from the 88s continued blasting the town. In between these explosions came the comparatively quiet singing of shots from small arms.

“That’s the kind of thing we’ve had all day,” said the colonel. “The main German forces moved out but left men planted all over the damn town. It’s small stuff they’re shooting and they’re bad shots—not so hot—but they’re a goddam nuisance. We’ll just have to keep right on until we clean every last one of them out.”

The rifle and small arms fire seemed to get closer to battalion headquarters. “Damn, that’s in close,” the colonel continued.

“We were out there and watched it twice, sir,” said a soldier. “Bullets were hitting the side of the building up high.”

“Where do you think he’s shooting from?” the colonel asked.

“I think there’s some sonofabitch up in that tall tree, sir,” the soldier answered.

Another GI came in.

“Some fellows just said we got the sniper in a tree near the railroad bridge, sir,” the soldier said. “The man shot him said the sniper was lying there with a small pistol in his hand.”

“A small pistol, you say?” the colonel asked, interestedly.

“Yes sir, a small pistol. It’s supposed to be a damn nice on, too,” the soldier said.

“Did they tell you whether the guy who shot the sniper had taken the pistol?” the colonel asked.
“No, sir. I heard that the soldier said the pistol was cocked and so he figured it might have been a booby trap,” the soldier said.

“Well, I’d sure like to get that pistol.” The colonel said. “But, hell, some GI’s got it by now. I guess there’s no use going over there. Too bad, because I’d sure like to have one of those small German pistols.”

A lieutenant, with a dent in his helmet, looked up. The dent had been caused by a sniper’s bullet that morning.

We checked the colonel’s map and pointed out the highway.

“Hell!” the colonel exclaimed. “You came in here the wrong way. You’d better go out the way my battalion came in.”

As we walked out of the colonel’s command post we heard somebody saying: “There goes a couple of guys that should’ve been ghosts by now.”