Chapter 8 - The Rhineland

During the evening of the 27th the squad was reorganized and Urbaniak was made squad leader, Gibson was promoted to assistant squad leader and I was given the first gun team. I don't remember whether I had an assistant gunner because the squad was reorganized again eleven days late

On the 28th of February we loaded up our vehicles and prepared to move out. About mid morning we were told to "mount up and move out," and we were soon moving south on the same highway we'd come north on two weeks before. Just before noon we swung to the east and headed to the Roer River near Hilfarth. We crossed the Roer early that afternoon at a bridgehead secured by the 35 Infantry Division on the night of the 25th and 26th. As we crossed the river, which had subsided from it's flooded condition of the previous weeks, our division commander General Devine was at the side of the road to wish us well. I noticed two huge truck trailers parked by the side of the road loaded to capacity with jerry cans of fuel. After crossing the bridge we swung to the left and headed north in a column. I believe that CCA, which had crossed the Roer the previous day, was leading the way with CCB just in front of us. We drove that night until we were right behind the still advancing 35 Infantry Division.

As we moved down the road we had to stop while they put the squad leader of the machine gun squad that had lost all his men into a restraint and carried him off in an ambulance. I later heard that he had looked back into his empty half-track and broke down with grief at the loss of so many of his buddies. We kept moving north. I can remember stopping for periods of fifteen or twenty minutes while the engineers were blowing the roadblocks set up at each small village. Then after several hours I heard a tremendous explosion. After that we would move for hours before being stopped again. The engineers had finally put enough explosive on one of the barricades to blow the roofs off of several nearby houses. After that, the word went north, and the German civilians were tearing down the barricades as we arrived. When we had overrun the word another large explosion cleared the way for five or ten miles. We had just passed a barn at a curve in the road when I looked back and saw a German Panzer IV parked in the barn with it's gun pointing out of a window down the road over which we had just passed. It was the first intact German tank I'd seen and it gave me a start. Fortunately the crew had already surrendered. On the morning of the first of March we ran out of a road net to operate on and came to rest.

After waiting through the day for room to move we started out again. We took Grefrath the next day and on the following day my task force, task force Walker consisting of Co C 58th Armd. Inf. Bn, 80th Tank less Co C, 2nd Platoons of Company C of the 53rd Armd. Eng., 88th Armd. Cav., and the 809 Tank Destroyers, was now at the head of the division. Two tanks led the way followed by the second platoon and several more tanks. Using this formation we moved to the northeast toward the Rhine River. During the following days there was only sporadic firing and I didn't fire my gun often. One day we were crossing a small valley and the tanks had their guns trained to the right to cover a small cluster of houses about 300 yards to the right of the road. Suddenly an 88 fired on us from the crest of the ridge about a half-mile in front of the first tank. The whole column sped up from about 15 mph to the tanks full speed of 35 mph and I could see the first tank's gun swinging around to fire up the road. The tank fired and I could see an explosion where the road disappeared over the ridge.

The column sped up the hill to the crest of the ridge and screeched to a halt. There was an 88 still smoking from the hit from the tank that had struck the gun where the barrel attached to the receiver. The gun crew was still sprawled on the ground with their jackets and shirts blown off. The tank's first shot had been perfect. I initially couldn't see much of the town because with the tanks and other half-tracks in front of the squad we had barely made the west side of the road cut. I could see Lt. Elias and one of the tank officers conferring and examining the situation. About ten minutes after we reached the crest a peep showed up with some more officers who joined in the examination of the enemy. Shortly the peep headed back down the hill and the vehicles were told to pull over to the side of the road as far as they could. There was a dirt road running along the crest of the ridge for several hundred yards before it disappeared into a thicket of trees to the south of my position. We could look back down the road and see that the column had closed up on our position. I could see the rest of our company consisting of several more Sherman tanks and all five of the self-propelled 105's. About a third of Combat Command Reserve was within a half mile of the ridge crest.

Soon I could see five tank destroyers pulling out of the column and racing up the hill towards us. These were the new high-speed units with 76mm high velocity guns that used HEAT High Explosive Anti-Tank rounds. These rounds had a shaped charge that could burn a hole through more than eight inches of armor. The came storming up the hill doing about 45 mph making a skidding turn on to the dirt road along the ridge crest. When the first Tank Destroyer had nearly reached the tree thicket the last TD had gone about thirty yards onto the road. They all swung to the left, slammed on the brakes and fired in unison. Every TD hit its assigned target, which was one of the five Mk IV's spread out in front of the German occupied town. We were told to dismount so I climbed down and moved the gun over to the forward face of the hill and started digging a hole. I could now see that the road ran down the hill through a large town with a bridge spanning a large river to the east of the town. A large number of German troops were running around like ants in a stirred ant's nest. Since it had been raining the ground was soft and it only took me several minutes to reach a depth of four feet. Nature called and I didn't want to leave my position so I dropped my drawers in front of over 500 Germans and relieved myself.

Lt. Elias called me over and told me that I was to take my gun crew and one of the rifle squads and take the houses on the left side of the road while he took the rest of the platoon and tackled the right side of the road. After we secured these houses the rest of the task force would pass through us and attempt to seize the bridge. We were to ride to the assault on the back of the tanks that had been gathered up in the road cut. I climbed up on the back of the third tank with my gun crew and half of the second rifle squad. The rest of the second squad climbed on the tank behind me along with a couple of the machine gun squad's riflemen. The rest of machine gun squad and the first rifle squad crawled on the tanks in front of mine. The mortar squad and the headquarters squad crawled onto the tanks to the rear and Lt. Elias climbed into a peep and we all prepared for our mad dash.

About this time a 40-mm Bofors the Germans had for antiaircraft protection had been brought forward so that it could fire at our position. It began popping away at us but couldn't bear directly on us because we were protected by the road cut. The shells were hitting the trees growing to our left about fifteen feet above our heads. Shattered tree limbs and 40 mm shrapnel showered us. No one seemed to be getting hit seriously but I was thinking, if these guys can hit an airplane they'll massacre us when we move out of this road defile. I was a very unhappy soldier, both because of the antiaircraft guns and because I didn't understand why Lt. Elias had given half the platoon to me when there were all the sergeants there. As I crouched there behind the tank turret worrying about my new responsibilities, the Germans in the town, the exploding shells above my head and at the same time examining the first tank I'd ever touched I was in emotional turmoil. As we prepared for the worst Major Walker and Captain Malarkey, who were standing next to Lieutenant Elias' peep which was just in front of and to the left of my tank, were working out the final details of the attack. A GI came running up yelling "hold everything, we've been pinched off by infantry divisions and are to retire to corps reserve." I was off the tank and sitting in the squad's half-track before the man had finished talking to the officers at the head of the column. In retrospect the plan was so daring that it might have succeeded. The Germans had been demoralized by the loss of their tanks in a split second of firing. There was an intact bridge across the river that I think was a tributary to the Rhine at Moers and only five miles from the Rhine. If we had taken it, it would have been a real coup. None of the history books I've read discuss this action and most say we weren't that close to the Rhine but these same histories say we stopped five miles from Recklinghausen three weeks later when I know that we were less than 600 yards from the outskirts. I think that Marshal Montgomery didn't want the American army to be the first across the Rhine River in his area. Of course our being pulled back into corps reserve may have saved my life, especially if the German antiaircraft gunners were any good.

Within ten minutes all the infantry had dismounted from the tanks and climbed back into the half-tracks. I looked back down the road to the rear and could see some self propelled 105mm howitzers spread out to the south of the road. Everyone did a U-turn and we started back to the rear. We drove on at about 20 mph through the late afternoon and into the dark. I was dozing off as we rattled along but looked out of the track and glanced at an intersection that we were passing. About a half-hour later I saw the same intersection pass by and thought, "Hell we're lost". After grinding along for another hour we finally came to a halt and dismounted. We were in a village of about twenty houses and we soon had set up guards and taken to our sleeping bags.

We where to stay in this village for several weeks before crossing the Rhine. While we were here Combat Command B tried to push north of Moers into Rheinberg and then onto to Rhine. During the next seven days they lost most of their tanks and suffered over 200 casualties and final reached the banks of the Rhine south of Wesel. They were then sent back to Holland near Wesel to rebuild the infantry and tank battalions. The rest of the division stayed in Germany and received and trained our replacements there.

On the second day of being on reserve we woke up and were told to fall out. First Sergeant, Simino, greeted us and announced that he was our new platoon leader and that Lt. Elias had been promoted to Captain and given command of Company B. He then asked if any of us had a problem. I raised my hand and told him I needed a new pair of boots and that the supply sergeant had not done a damn thing for me. He asked me my boot size and told me to meet him back there in an hour and dismissed the platoon. When I met him he handed me a pair of boots of the right size. It paid to have a platoon leader who was an ex first sergeant.

We got a whole group of replacements the next day. There must have been about twenty-five of them and I was assigned the job of teaching them all about the automatic weapons in the company. Some of them had never fired either the Browning automatic Rifle or any of the three machine gun types we had in the company so I had to go through use of all the weapons with them. I showed them how to disassemble all the weapons and operate them. Since the most of them would most likely have to use the BAR I taught them all the five usual reason for a stoppage and how to remedy each. Not all of them learned very well or I wasn't a very good teacher because after we went back into action I kept getting calls from guys in my platoon for help fixing the BAR. I helped out for about a week but finally told them they had to fix it themselves because I was tired of crawling around exposing myself and getting shot at to fix their BARs, and that they had to pay attention and learn to do it themselves. These calls for help soon ceased.

I received an 18-year-old kid named Ray Bauman for an assistant gunner and a rifleman from the veterans as an ammunition bearer. When we went into action next, I soon learned why I was blessed with Tony. He was the most worthless soldier I ever met. The first time we were fired on we were going up a hill with Ray to my left and Tony to my right. At the first shot Tony disappeared and when I looked around for him he was hiding behind me using me for a shield. I gave him a dirty look and we continued to advance abreast. Ray, however, stuck to me like glue and was always there when I needed him. He had been in high school in December and had only been in the army about 12 weeks but he was eager to learn and a willing worker.

The first time Ray and I were assigned guard duty together we were sent off to guard a road block about five miles from our company. We were to stay there 24 hours when we were to be relieved. We had a pup tent pitched about ten feet from the roadblock to give us a place to rest. We hadn't been there more than an hour when Ray came back to the roadblock that I had been watching. He'd been out exploring the area within about 100 yards of the roadblock. He came back with a smile on his face and held out his hand saying, " look what I found," and showed me an unexploded 20 mm cannon shell. I told him that the thing could explode if jarred and told him to throw it away. He protested that he wanted to keep it as a souvenir. I responded that he wasn't going to keep a souvenir like that around me and told him to put the round on a nearby bank and take a shot at it. I had given him my rifle, which was a very good one, when I had been issued a carbine. He did what I told him to do and shot at his souvenir from about twenty yards. It takes an expert rifleman to hit a 20-mm shell from twenty yards so Ray missed but only by less than a half inch. The ground shock from the M1's impact set the shell off and there was an explosion and a little whistling shrapnel. From then on Ray and I were bosom buddies and I could always rely on him to do the right thing.

That afternoon while I was sleeping in the pup tent, Ray yelled at me. I jumped out of the tent as he ran up to me yelling that a German civilian car had ignored his instructions to halt and was now pulling away from the roadblock. He said," What'll I do". I grabbed his rifle chambered a round as I ran to the road where I saw the car about 150 yards away and slowly gathering speed. I stepped into the lane the car was in so it was traveling directly away from me, took a bead on the center of the rear window and squeezed of a round. The driver slammed on the brakes and I motioned him to back up. When he got back to the roadblock both he and his passenger were pasty white and shaking. My shot had hit the exact center of the rear window, passed between the two of them and punched a hole in the center of the windshield. He was so shaken up and scared of us that it took me several minutes to find out that he had a permit to drive and that he thought that because of the permit he didn't have to stop at road blocks. After examining his permit I told him to go ahead but warned him that a permit allowed him to drive but didn't allow him to ignore directions from allied soldiers. I also pointed out that the next GI might not be as good a shot or as good-natured as I was and sent him on his way. It seems strange to me that he would run a road block, but I guess that he was given the driving permit so that he could help manage the civilian population for the American army and thought that gave him special privileges. I only met a few Germans that had this authority arrogance ingrained, but then, I only met a few Germans in positions of responsibility.

While we were in reserve and rebuilding our strength we got showers which was the first time I'd had been completely clean in nearly a month. I also tried to get a new A6 model of the light machine gun from the armorer sergeant but he refused to give up his new gun. This really annoyed me because my gun was so worn that I had to put a piece of crimped brass under the back plate to get enough travel in the trigger to fire the gun. He did, however, offer to weld on the bipod from a German machine gun so that I could fire my gun without using the regulation tripod. This allowed me to carry the gun with a half a belt of ammunition in it and ready to fire. I would carry the gun instead of the tripod, Ray would carry two boxes of ammunition instead of the gun and Tony could carry two more boxes of ammunition. This gave me a heavy combat load but lightened the load on the rest of the team and gave us over nearly three hundred more rounds of ammunition when we were away from the track and allowed me to put the gun into action within seconds.

While we waited for our next action we settled into a fairly comfortable existence. We found some cooking fat and set up a business of frying potatoes at 25 cents a batch. I forget what happened to the squad's newfound wealth. We also did a little sight seeing and got the half-track stuck in a ditch. The track was hung up on its front roller and back bumpers with the front wheels and tracks hanging in space. It took the whole squad several hours to gather enough timbers from the surrounding area to build up under the tracks to get traction to lift the track out of the ditch. We eventually were scrounging up to a quarter mile away for material. We also took the track out to practice grenade throwing. I managed to get a piece of shrapnel under the bill of my helmet that pealed all the skin off of one side of my nose. Fortunately that was the only damage done and a compression bandage had the bleeding stopped before we got back to the company area. While on our grenade practice we decided to test the strength of our track's armor plate. That was a mistake. First we took an armor piercing round from a machine gun belt and fired with a Garand at the side of the track. It made a neat hole, ricocheted off a brace between the armor and the seat back, bounced off the floor of the track and disappeared. We next tried a ball round which also pierced the armor and bounced around in the track. This was getting very interesting, so we tried a dummy bazooka training round that punched a nice neat one and a half inch diameter hole in the drivers door. I think this was a case where ignorance would have been bliss. I suppose the armor was satisfactory against low velocity shrapnel or high velocity glancing projectiles.

Lloyd Parish and Willard Patrick, two squad half-track drivers, decided to borrow a half-track and go off and seek adventure. Parish, from Indiana, and Patrick were two red necks who were bosom buddies. Their idea of a good time was to get drunk and then fight. If they couldn't find someone else to fight they beat up on each other. On this trip they found something alcoholic, got drunk, drove the half-track through the wall of a Germans home and then beat up and hospitalized several MPs who tried to arrest them. Three MPs with shotguns brought them back to the company in chains. Malarkey called our lieutenant and talked it over with him. They decided to call on Captain Elias' assistance and we all waited until he showed up. Elias told the MPs to remove the chains, and they refused. Elias assured them that it would be safe so after some persuasion they did. Elias then marched the two out to the middle of the field and started berating them. It looked quite comical because Elias was about five feet nine inches tall and they were both well over six feet. He was yelling at them and shaking a finger under their noses and they were vigorously nodding their heads in agreement with him. After about fifteen minutes they returned and Elias asked them if they were going to behave themselves and they both said "yes sir". They did until Parish was killed when he parked his track near Lippstadt and followed his Headquarters squad into a firefight to see what was happening. Patrick never forgave the Germans. After the war he would get drunk and spend the night beating up on every young adult male German he could find. After the war when we were in Duderstadt, I believe, we were living in a German barracks. I had gone over the wall to visit town and on my return I found Patrick kneeling over another GI lying on the ground pleading, "I didn't mean it buddy, I thought you was a German". I climbed back over the wall and called the guard house to tell them there was a ruckus going on outside the wall and they ought to go investigate, and to take a medic with them.

One afternoon I went out to a recovered tank dump about a half-mile from town. There were about thirty Sherman tanks in a large area. Each tank I looked at had a hole in the front armor. It was interesting to me that most of the holes I saw were within a few feet of the white star painted on the front of the tank for identification. I thought that the Germans must have been using the star as an aiming point. In addition it didn't seem logical to me to paint a nice big white star right in the middle of a camouflage paint scheme. I didn't crawl up and peer into the tanks because I only had a limited time before I had to get back to the platoon. It would probably been very depressing if I had. I didn't see many burned out tanks. This may have been because they only park tanks with a high salvage content in this particular tank park.

During the first few days at our new home we had driven down a road which had a pile of lifted teller mines along it. The mines were about a 1000 yards from the outskirts of the village. The pile was about five feet high eight feet wide and 300 feet long. The pile was parallel to the road and about twenty feet off the side of the road. We were inside one day when there was a terrific explosion. We ran outside and saw a huge billowing cloud of smoke and dust arising from the location of the mine dump. About half the houses on the mine side of the village had shed their slate roofs and many houses had broken windows on the sides of the houses facing the mines. Fortunately no one was hurt but it didn't improve the habitability of the houses the company was billeted in. We later heard that a young engineering officer had been told to get rid of the mines so he had placed blocks of nitro-starch connected by prima cord along the top of the pile. This was a standard procedure for exploding a mine field for clearance; however, the usual mine field had the same number of mines spread over a wide area and the mines were buried which directed the force of the mine explosion upward. When he let the whole pile go up in one blast he ended up blowing a crater about sixty feet wide and about five feet deep that took out over 100 yards of the road. We never did find out what happened to the nut that did it, and it required a major shifting around of the company's accommodations.

About the middle of March we were asked for volunteers who had experience in small craft with outboard motors. Stan Plessela, who had replaced me as Drost's assistant gunner fit the bill, and volunteered. That afternoon he and one or two other packed up their barracks bags and climbed into a truck and disappeared. We didn't see them again for about ten days.

During our stay in the Rhineland we were eating hot chow except when we were out on exercises or manning roadblocks away from the company area. We weren't worked too hard and the main concern was to integrate the replacements into the company. In addition to Ray and Tony we got a young fellow who had been a butchers apprentice. I think he ended up as an ammunition bearer for Drost. My memory isn't clear, but Cliff Tierney may have been reassigned to the squad and was put into the rifle team. With the exception of Stan we were back to full strength and with the food and rest were feeling pretty good. The weather tended to be overcast and there were days of drizzling rain; however, the temperature had climbed and didn't drop below freezing at night so in general we were quite comfortable.

During the early morning of March 24 a tremendous artillery barrage to the east awakened us. We knew that the Ninth Army's assault of the Rhine River had started. The barrage was a continuous thunder that lasted for an hour and then subsided into intermittent blasts of called for fire support. On the 25th Stan reappeared and told us that he had been trucked to Holland were he had been trained in handling an assault boat and then had been assigned to ferry part of the 30th Infantry Division across the Rhine. That night we received notice to be prepared to move out on thirty minutes notice. The following night we were off to cross the Rhine.