Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II (11 page)

From the top of the hill we could see no signs of any Germans, so we ran back to the Jeep and motioned the truck crew to move out. We went around the tank and headed down the road at top speed. Seeing the burned-out tank now appeared to be a sign that one of our columns had gone up the road the day before, but I was not sure that the Germans hadn’t come back and blocked the road again. Although we proceeded with extreme caution, we felt that speed was our best defense.

About halfway between Villers-Cotterêts and Meaux, we came upon a straight, clear stretch of road about a mile and a half long. Just as we entered one end of this stretch, I saw another vehicle enter the other end headed in our direction. It appeared to be either a Jeep or a Volkswagen. We both seemed to slow down simultaneously. I was holding my rifle and told Vernon to be ready to hit the ditch at any moment.

Finally, both vehicles reached the point where we could recognize each other. I was relieved to find out that it was an American Jeep. A major and his driver were headed north and wanted to know the situation between there and Soissons. I told him that the division had occupied Soissons the night before; I also told him the route I had taken from Soissons to this point. I explained about the German snipers in the woods on the logging road and about the supposed roadblock on the west highway on the other side of Soissons. He thanked me and told me that the road to Meaux was clear as far as he knew.

When we arrived at Meaux, I turned over the sergeant and the truckload of soldiers to the POW enclosure in division trains, went to the maintenance battalion headquarters and turned in my combat loss report, then went to division trains headquarters and told them about the possible roadblock on the west road. I was told that they had already received confirming information on this roadblock and that about fortyfive minutes before I came through Villers-Cotterêts, an American ambulance half-track with red crosses painted on the front and both sides and filled with wounded men was ambushed at this same roadblock. All personnel had been killed. I realized what a narrow escape I’d had.

This incident had a profound effect on me, and it is with a deep sense of humility that I recall it. I realized how life takes strange turns and how seemingly unimportant things can become of paramount importance. In all those years I studied French, I felt it was a waste of time, but I realize it was probably the very margin that saved my life and the lives of those with me.

I was reminded of this several years later when I came to Birmingham, Alabama, for an engagement party for me and my fiancée at the home of Frank Dixon, the former governor of Alabama. Dixon was the law partner of my fiancée’s father. During the course of the evening, I chanced to step into the den and was immediately drawn to a map on the wall. It was of Villers-Cotterêts. The town didn’t seem to have changed much from the way it looked on the map I had used in World War II and still had in my possession.

I told Governor Dixon that I was interested in the map because I’d had an extremely narrow escape in this town during the war. I wondered how he happened to have a copy of it. He told me that he’d also had a narrow escape in this area, and he pointed to an open field about three miles east of the town. This was where he’d been shot down as an observer in the Army Air Corps during World War I. His leg had been shattered, and he lay in a shell hole in no-man’s-land for twenty-four hours before the medics could get to him. As a result, gangrene set in and he lost his leg. He said the map had been in his pocket when he was shot down, and he’d kept it ever since.

Soissons and Laon: Battleground of World War I

I arrived back at Soissons about noon that same day and immediately went to CCB headquarters, located in a villa on the west side of town. As I was coming out of the villa from a liaison officers’ briefing, I was met by a crescendo of ack-ack fire. There were several M15 and M16 half-tracks from the 486th Antiaircraft Battalion protecting the headquarters, and all of the armored vehicles and some of the GMC trucks had .50-caliber machine guns. They seemed to open up simultaneously.

We had two L5 Cubs aloft observing artillery fire north of Soissons. As I took cover, I looked up and saw what I thought at first were P47s diving in on the area, but I realized as they got closer that they were FW190s. I assumed they were going to strafe CCB headquarters, but instead they went after the two observers flying about a thousand yards to our left at about fifteen hundred feet. They were fighters, and they came in single file one after another.

As the fighters approached our planes, our antiaircraft fire ceased to avoid hitting our own people. One of the L5s was hit and exploded in midair. The flaming wreckage plummeted to the ground. The other pilot immediately put his plane into a steep dive; he barely pulled out and skimmed the treetops before hitting the ground. The FW190 on his tail was going too fast and had to pull out. The second L5 escaped and was covered by the antiaircraft fire that started up again.The German fighters did not stay around long enough to strafe our headquarters.

I finally got out of my cover and went to see if Vernon was okay. One of the other men said that the last time he saw my driver, he was making a beeline for one of the concrete culverts under the road. That’s where I found him, about ten feet inside—a much better hiding place than I’d had.

The next morning, with enemy resistance around Soissons neutralized, the division started north to Laon. By that time, C Company Maintenance Battalion Headquarters Platoon had joined Combat Command B, and Captain Sam Oliver asked me to take the company through Soissons and meet him on the other side.

We finally arrived at a straight stretch of road about half a mile outside of town, where I stopped the column. The men were stretched out at normal march interval. I told Sergeant Fox to pass the word for everybody to be on the alert. The column, headed by an armored scout car with a .50-caliber machine gun, was followed by fifty-four vehicles, including thirty GMC trucks. Every ninth truck had a ring mount with a .50-caliber machine gun. This gave us seven .50 calibers, a 57mm antitank gun, and two hundred men equipped with M1 carbines.

I stood on the road beside my Jeep with my map case on the hood and was discussing the route with Vernon and one of the C Company platoon leaders. Bitch was in the backseat next to my maintenance manual box. On our right was a cornfield with a gently rising slope that crested about three hundred yards away. The cornstalks had been harvested and stacked neatly in rows.

Suddenly, our tranquillity was interrupted by a series of sharp cracks, which I knew immediately was sniper fire. I hit the road. The fire became a regular fusillade. We crawled across the road on our hands and knees and dropped into the ditch on the opposite side. Bitch saw us crawling and jumped out of the Jeep, but instead of running at her full twelve-inch height, she got down on her knees and elbows with her little belly dragging on the pavement, crawled across the road, and snuggled underneath my armpit. I wondered if she thought she was a human being.

Sergeant Fox immediately swung the .50 caliber to the right and let go with several short bursts. The fire from the other side stopped immediately. From the field slightly to our rear and to the right came a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier with a 37mm antitank gun mounted on the back. The gun swung toward the top of the hill. The sergeant in charge asked what we were shooting at. I told him we had received some fire from the other side of the hill. Captain Oliver arrived, got in the scout car with Sergeant Fox, and, because the firing had stopped, told me to proceed.

We left C Company and headed toward Laon at top speed. We had gone about half a mile when the road curved to the right and started down a hill. A dozen French underground fighters had congregated at the edge of the road just around the curve and waved me down. As I came to a stop, they pointed toward a World War I–era concrete bunker that had been reinforced and rebuilt. They wanted me to go in the bunker and get a couple of German soldiers who were holed up there.

“
You
go in there and get ’em,” I said. “It looks like you’ve got about a dozen men, and you’ve all got German rifles.”

There was always a language barrier between my poor French and their understanding, and I could hear many statements of
“non compris.”
I could see what was bothering them; they had absolutely no desire to go into that pillbox and face a couple of armed men in the dark. I felt the same way. We had been instructed to move as rapidly to the target as possible and not allow ourselves to be delayed or sidetracked by events that could be easily handled by others. The mission of the infantry, supplemented by the Free French, was to mop up stragglers. In my judgment, this situation was pretty well in hand.

I pulled out a white phosphorus grenade, gave it to one of the men, and explained how to hold the safety, pull the pin, throw it into the bunker, then hit the deck fast. A broad grin broke out on his face.
“Oui compris, oui compris.”

The Frenchman got around the bunker and yelled in French and German for the two German soldiers to come out. When there was no response, he pulled the pin and tossed the grenade down the stairway. There was a muffled explosion, then white smoke began to come out of the bunker. As I started down the highway in my Jeep, two German soldiers came screaming out of the bunker with their hands over their head. I realized that it was the fire from these Free French that had been enfilading our column.

A few miles north of Soissons, we passed through a major World War I battleground. On the right was an American cemetery with a large statue dedicated by the French government to the American war dead. The statue, which stood in the middle of the cemetery, was eighty to ninety feet tall and was made from white Italian marble. It was a Statue of Liberty holding a dead American soldier in her arms; her head was drooped and she was crying. On the base of the statue—a block of granite fifteen to twenty feet square—was an inscription with the names of all Americans killed in that area.

German stragglers were running through the cemetery trying to take cover from the Free French who were following close behind them. There was a considerable firefight in the cemetery before the Germans were rounded up.

I’ve thought many times of this terrible irony. Here was a beautiful memorial, a symbol of the men who sacrificed their lives in World War I, desecrated by the failure to keep the peace afterward. This profoundly sad moment made me realize that nothing appeared sacred anymore.

We bivouacked in a large, open cornfield outside of Laon. We were on high ground above the city with only the neatly stacked rows of cornstalks available for camouflage. Each vehicle parked as close as possible to a large stack, then spread a camouflage net over both the stack and the vehicle. Vernon drove the Jeep right into the middle of the stack so that it was almost completely covered. We placed our bedrolls as close to the stack as possible and turned in. It was a clear night with plenty of starlight but fortunately no moon.

Sometime after midnight I was awakened by a heavy drone. Practically overhead appeared a large squadron of German Ju88 twin-engine bombers. Flying in three-column formation, the planes appeared to be spaced only a couple of yards apart. They flew extremely low, perhaps less than a thousand feet, and we expected to be deluged with butterfly bombs at any moment. It was the largest group of German planes—at least fifty—that I had ever seen in combat.

The drone continued overhead for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, the last plane disappeared to the southwest. The planes returned about an hour later, flying northeast; they appeared stretched out and fewer in number. Someone said later that these planes had bombed Paris one last time and had encountered some American night fighters on the way back. In both instances, our antiaircraft people were sharp enough not to fire on them. This large group could have wreaked havoc on our ground forces.

I remembered an incident in Mayenne on the night before we moved toward Chartres and Paris. A lone German reconnaissance bomber flew over our position, and the antiaircraft fire opened up with great intensity. We could tell the difference between the motor of a German aircraft and that of our own. We soon heard a second droning noise, which sounded different. All of a sudden the antiaircraft fire ceased, and we saw a stream of impending tracers make a short burst through the air, then terminate in an explosion as the German plane’s flaming wreckage struck the ground. We had heard that the air force had a night fighter equipped with radar, known as the “Black Widow,” but this was the first time we had seen it in action. Thereafter, night reconnaissance by German planes decreased.

The division moved rapidly in multiple columns as it led the VII Corps. Information from captured German field orders apparently was extremely helpful, because the Germans were using Meaux, Soissons, and Laon as main exit points. The other points indicated in the field order were Maubeuge and Mons, to the north of us; the division proceeded rapidly in that direction.

On the morning of September 2, the division crossed the Belgian border and proceeded toward Mons via Maubeuge. The night before, I had gone back to Soissons to division trains to deliver my combat loss report to Major Arrington. He’d told me he had a contingent of replacement tanks to go forward. The convoy was assembled early the next day.

I had seventeen M4 medium tanks, a two-and-a-half-ton GMC truck, and a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier for the maintenance crew. Each tank had a skeleton crew of two men. About a third had been survivors of knocked-out tanks; the rest were ordnance maintenance mechanics. Each repaired or replacement tank was fully loaded and equipped with gasoline, water, rations, and ammunition.

Although the maintenance men had no combat experience, they were skilled in operating the weapons. The tanks were evenly dispersed among the twelve tank platoons of the 1st and 2d Battalion medium tank companies of the 33d Armored Regiment. Only in a couple of incidences did we have two tanks in the same platoon. I mention this because the tanks had radios set to talk only on certain channels. For example, a tank could talk to other tanks in the same platoon and to the platoon commander, but the platoon commander could talk only to the company commander, who in turn could talk only to other company commanders. It was important for the men to understand this in case we ran into a firefight.

I showed the men our route on the map and told them we might meet up with a German column at any time, even though the division had already gone through this area. The turret man in each tank would be the acting tank commander and would man the .50-caliber ring-mount machine gun. Although the tanks might not be able to communicate with one another, the men could use hand signals. As we started up the road to Laon, I realized that although we didn’t have full crews, with seventeen tanks we had the equivalent strength of a medium tank company.