The Battle for St. Lo - Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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.