The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (43 page)

On February 4, C Company pushed off, into the Siegfried Line. Swanson remembered that “our visibility was severely limited because it began snowing and shortly the heavy winds caused the snow storm to reach blizzard proportions. The order then came to fix bayonets.” Honey recalled “charging into a snow storm with fixed bayonets and the wind blowing right into our faces. After moving through the initial line of dragon’s teeth we began encountering deserted pillboxes. At one command post out came ten Germans with hands in the air offering no resistance.”

Pvt. Irv Mark of C Company said, “I remember taking one pillbox, and this stands out in my memory. The Krauts were waiting to surrender and the one in charge seemingly berated us for taking so long to come and get them. He said,’Nicht etwas zu essen’ (nothing to eat). Strange we didn’t feel one bit sorry for them.” Swanson noted that “none of our company can recall any direct fire during our advance through the West Wall, although artillery shells dropped on us. We suffered no combat casualties possibly because we were much smarter than we had been six weeks earlier, particularly about booby traps and land mines.” Few companies were that lucky. Sgt. Clinton Riddle of the 82nd Airborne was in B Company, 325th Glider Infantry. At 0200, February 2, he accompanied the company commander on a patrol. “We walked to within sight of the dragon teeth of the Siegfried Line. We walked parallel with the line quite some distance. We could barely make out the pillbox on either side of the road that led through the dragon teeth. The teeth were laid out in five double rows, staggered. The Krauts had emplacements dotting the hill-sides, so arranged as to cover each other with cross fire, and all zeroed in on the road where it passed through the teeth.” Returning from the patrol, the captain ordered an attack. “It was cold and the snow was deep,” Riddle recalled. A company went first. It was met by small arms and mortar fire and was quickly driven to the ground. “There was more fire from the emplacements than I ever dreamed there could be,” Riddle remarked, an indication of how well concealed many German fortifications were. “Men were falling in the snow all around me. That was an attack made on the belly. We crawled through most of the morning.” Using standard fire-and-movement tactics, the Americans managed to drive the Germans beyond the ridge and over the road.  “When we reached the road leading through the teeth,” Riddle said, “the captain looked back over his shoulder and said, ‘Come on, let’s go!’ Those were the last words he ever said, because the Germans had that road covered and when he was halfway across he got hit right between the eyes. There was only three of us in our company still on our feet that we could account for when it was over.” Another twenty-five men turned up and the new CO, a lieutenant, began employing fire-and-movement to attack the pillboxes on either side of the road. But the Germans had been through enough. After their CO ordered the initial resistance, and then fired the shot that killed the American captain, his men shot him and prepared to surrender. So, Riddle related, “When we reached the pillboxes, the Germans came out, calling out’Kamerad.’ We should have shot them on the spot.  They had their dress uniforms on, with their shining boots. We had been crawling in the snow, wet, cold, hungry, sleepy, tired, mad because they had killed so many of our boys.” They were through the initial defenses of the Siegfried Line, and that was enough for the moment.

The 90th Division reached the Siegfried Line at exactly the spot where the 106th Division had been hit and decimated on December 16. Pvt. Jack Ammons spent the night of February 5-6, 1945, in a bombed-out building on the edge of the line.  “The village was eerie,” he remembered. “It looked like a million ghosts of previous campaigns had passed through it.” At 0400, February 6, the 359th Regiment of the 90th picked its way undetected through the dragon’s teeth, minefields, barbed wire, and pillboxes in the outer ring of the fortifications.  Shortly after dawn, pillboxes that had gone unnoticed came to life, pouring fire into the tanks and reinforcements following the infantry, stopping the advance.  A week-long fight ensued.

The Germans employed a new tactic to confound the Americans. Captain Colby explained it: “Whole platoons of infantrymen disappeared as a result of the German tactic of giving up a pillbox easily, then subjecting it to pre-sighted artillery and mortar fire, forcing the attackers inside the shelter. Then they covered the doorway with fire, surrounding the pillbox after dark, and blowing it in. The men soon learned it was safer outside the fortifications than inside.”

On February 9 regimental chaplain Father Donald Murphy noted a variation of the tactic in his diary: “K Company was in a pillbox. The GI outpost fell asleep and Jerries captured all of them, including Lts. Franklin and Osborne. The pillboxes are really death traps. You are helpless when you get in them.” Patton inspected a command pillbox: “It consisted of a three-story submerged barracks with toilets, shower baths, a hospital, laundry, kitchen, storerooms, and every conceivable convenience plus an enormous telephone installation.  Electricity and heat were produced by a pair of diesel engines with generators.  Yet the whole offensive capacity of this installation consisted of two machine guns operating from steep cupolas which worked up and down by means of hydraulic lifts. As in all cases, this particular pillbox was taken by a dynamite charge against the back door. We found marks on the cupolas where 90 mm shells, fired at a range of two hundred yards, had simply bounced.” To Patton, this was yet another proof of “the utter futility of fixed defenses.  . . . In war, the only sure defense is offense, and the efficiency of offense depends on the warlike souls of those conducting it.” Captain Colby gives a vivid snapshot of American artillery in action: “We were looking at a day’s assignment of about a dozen pillboxes. We were on a slightly higher ground and could see them plainly. As we studied the prospect with sinking feelings, a self-propelled 155 mm gun chugged and clanked up to us. A lieutenant dismounted and walked over.

“ ‘I hear you could use some fire,’ he said.

“We did everything but hug him. We told him to pick out a pillbox and let fly.  “The lieutenant pointed to a pillbox. The gunner lowered the muzzle of the howitzer, opened the gun’s breech-block, and peered through the barrel at the target. Satisfied with his aim, he told the loaders to stuff in a round.” A 155 mm shell weighed 100 pounds. It took two men to put it on a carrier equipped with handles like a litter, two others to pick up the carrier and hold the shell to the chamber of the gun. A fifth man shoved it in and stuffed in the bags of gunpowder. When the breech was closed and all was ready, the gunner yanked the lanyard.

The tremendous roar was, Colby said, “thrilling to an infantryman.” He noted that the .30 caliber bullets he was shooting were 0.3 inch in diameter, while the 155 shell was 6.1 inches.

“The shell struck the pillbox and covered it with a sheet of flame from the explosive charge it carried. A perfect smoke ring popped out of an air vent in the top.”

“Scratch one pillbox,” the lieutenant said.

“It is still standing,” Colby retorted.

“Yep. But there ain’t anyone left alive inside. If there is, his brains are scrambled.”

Colby felt that having revealed their position, they should take cover before the Germans started their counterfire. “Aw, hell,” the lieutenant said, “let’s blast some more before the fun starts. You wanta fire one?” How could Colby resist? After another line-of-sight aim through the open bore, the gun was loaded and Colby gave a jerk on the lanyard. Scratch another pillbox. The lieutenant told Colby to get behind the gun where it next fired, saying he could watch the shell all the way to the target.  “He zeroed in on another pillbox. Sure enough, when the gun fired I could see a black dot arc swiftly toward the target. Again, there was a flash that covered the whole target. They fired a round or two at each pillbox out in front of us, then folded their equipment and clanked away to another scene. When we moved up, we found only dead or dazed men inside the pillboxes.” Colby’s final comment was, “No matter how many pillboxes or bunkers there might be, the fact was that man had built them and man was tearing them down. The elaborate system of ‘Dragon’s Teeth’ proved to be worthless and brought from us exclamations of amazement at the labor the Germans had expended.” That point was equally true when applied to the Atlantic Wall. At the Siegfried Line in February, as at the Atlantic Wall in June 1944, the Germans got precious little return on their big investment in poured concrete.  By the beginning of March, K Company, 333rd Regiment, had reached the Rhine. The men settled down in the village of Krefeld to await Montgomery’s Operation Plunder, the crossing of the river; Monty was planning the operation with as much care as he had put into Operation Overlord, so the pause was a long one. By some miracle, the men found an undamaged high-rise apartment building in which everything worked-electricity, hot water, flush toilets, and telephones with dial tones. They had their first hot baths in four months. They found cigars and bottles of cognac. Pvt. Ray Bocarski, fluent in German, lit up, sat down in an easy chair, got a befuddled German operator on the phone, and talked his way through to a military headquarters in Berlin. He told the German officer he could expect K Company within the week.

That was not to be. Having reached the river, K Company along with the rest of Ninth Army would stay in place until Montgomery had everything ready for Operation Plunder. The troops badly needed the rest. The night after taking Hardt, Pvt. Strawberry Craft was so totally exhausted that after getting into his foxhole he told the sergeant he was going to sleep that night. The sergeant warned him, “You might wake up dead.” Craft replied, “I’ll just have to wake up dead.” Decades later he still remembered the exchange, and explained, “I needed the sleep, and I got it, too.”

That kind of exhaustion was becoming endemic. Sgt. Joe Skocz of the 103rd Division was out on a night patrol. His lead scout was a veteran of sixty-five days of combat and had always done his duty. Suddenly the patrol stopped. Skocz went forward to see what was up. The scout, crouching behind a tree, pointed ahead and said, “There’s people out there. They’re waiting to nail us.” “They’re not moving,” Skocz pointed out.

“Neither are we.”

Skocz ordered the scout to go forward and see what he could see. And as Skocz remembered it, “He leans up real close to my head and he says, ‘Fuck you, Sergeant. You wanta find out, go up yourself.’ “ Skocz did and discovered there was nothing out there. “When we got back, I told him I never wanted to see him on the front lines again.”

Sgt. William Faust of the 1st Division had been in combat in two continents and six countries. By March 1945, he said, “Those of us still remaining of the ‘Big Red One’ of 1942 had lost the desire to pursue; the enthusiasm we had for this sort of thing in Africa, Sicily, France, Luxembourg and Belgium was no longer with us.”

On March 15, Pvt. Martin Duus of the 103rd Division, who had been in combat since the previous December, got hit in the neck. The bullet exited through his right shoulder. “My whole right arm was dead. I couldn’t move it. I thought I’d lost it. I couldn’t look.” He never used it again; it was paralyzed. But his reaction belied the seriousness of the wound, while it spoke eloquently of the state of the old hands: “I was damn glad I was hit and could get out of there.  Absolutely. My fear was I’d get well enough to go back.” On March 7 Patton’s forces were still fighting west of the Rhine, trying to close to the river from Koblenz south to Mainz and in the process trap further German forces facing the U.S. Seventh Army. Patton was having divisions stolen from him, to dispatch south to help Seventh Army get through the Siegfried Line east of Saarbrücken. That made him furious, but he calmed down when Bradley agreed to move the boundary between 1Third and Seventh Armies some twenty kilometers south of Mainz. That put the best stretch of river for crossing south of Cologne in his sector. He was thinking of crossing on the run, and hoping he could do it before Montgomery’s elephantine Operation Plunder even got started, and before Hodges, too, if possible.

But his men were exhausted. “Signs of the prolonged strain had begun to appear,” one regimental history explained. “Slower reactions in the individual; a marked increase in cases of battle fatigue, and a lower standard of battle efficiency-all showed quite clearly that the limit was fast approaching.” G Company, 328th Infantry Regiment, was typical. It consisted of veterans whose bone-weariness was so deep they were indifferent, or on the edge of battle fatigue, plus raw recruits. Still it had the necessary handful of leaders, and superb communications with the artillery, as demonstrated by Lieutenant Otts in the second week in March, during Third Army’s drive toward the Rhine. Pvt.  George Idelson described it in a 1988 letter to Otts: “My last memory of you-and it is a vivid one-is of you standing in a fierce mortar and artillery barrage, totally without protection, calling in enemy coordinates. I know what guts it took to do that. I can still hear those damn things exploding in the trees. I lost one foxhole buddy to shrapnel in that barrage, and then his replacement. I don’t know who was looking after me.”

On the morning of March 7, Lt. Harold Larsen of the 9th Division was flying in a Piper Cub, looking for targets of opportunity. To his astonishment, he saw the great Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen still standing. He radioed the news back to Gen. William Hoge, who immediately sent orders to the units nearest Remagen to take the bridge before the Germans could blow it.  The closest unit was A Company, 27th Armored Infantry Battalion. Its CO had been put out of action the previous day; Lt. Karl Timmermann, twenty-two years old, had replaced him. Timmermann fought his way to the approaches to the bridge. His battalion commander ordered him to get across.

“What if the bridge blows up in my face?” Timmermann asked.  The battalion commander turned and walked away without a word. Timmermann called to his squad leaders, “All right, we’re going across.” There was a huge explosion. It shook Remagen and sent a volcano of stones and earth erupting from the west end of the bridge. The Germans had detonated a cratering charge that gouged a deep hole in the earthen causeway joining the main road and the bridge platform. The crater made it impossible for vehicles to get onto the bridge-but not infantry.