Chapter 10 - Towards the Rhine Again

We moved northwest for about an hour and then turned east. After traveling until the late afternoon we stopped and were told to move into some buildings to the south. Unfortunately German soldiers occupied the buildings and it took about a half-hour to throw them out.

In the process a German dispatch rider tried to ride through our line of scrimmage and refused to stop. About twenty GIs shot at him. He was lifted off his motorcycle and blown about ten feet in front of it by the impact of the bullets. The rest of the Germans gave up after witnessing his death. We got a few hours of sleep that night, some more rest the next day. Early the second day after leaving the Recklinghausen area we were told to mount up. We moved farther east and then swung south until we stopped just to the west of Lippstadt.

We had reached the outskirts of Lippstadt in the afternoon and as the officers conferred on our next move I could see the bodies of some 3rd Armored Division infantry lying by the side of the road. On their shoulders were armored division patches with their motto "Spearhead" under the yellow, red and blue triangle. There were a few German civilians wandering about the houses giving us worried looks. In about fifteen minutes we swung west, and the second platoon started down a raised roadway towards a village about three quarters of a mile away. I wasn't told what we were supposed to do and so I chambered a round in the machine gun and looked out at the fields as we sped along. We had gone about a half-mile when we received small arms fire. We were just passing a small cluster of farmhouses to our left when the platoon came to a halt.

We started getting more fire from our right so we all dismounted. I reached up and got my gun out of its mount. I felt exposed standing next to the track which was on a road elevated about five feet above the surrounding fields. As soon as I'd retrieved the gun I ran around the back of the track and dove off the road. As I hit the ground I inadvertently fired about twenty rounds because my finger squeezed the trigger as I jumped and I couldn't release the trigger until I could transfer the weight of the gun to my left hand. As I finally placed the gun on the ground and prepared for action, I saw a white flag waving over a small clump of bushes and trees a hundred yards away into which my tracers had plunged. I had captured about five Germans without knowing they were there. It seemed that these had been the main source of the small arms fire and they thought I had them dead to rights with my well-placed burst of fire. While falling , no less, what a good shot I was.

I was still smiling over my conquest as most of the platoon, along with the first two tracks moved into the courtyard of the farm buildings and waited for the next move. The next move was the company's executive officer climbing on the hood of one of the tracks and giving us hell for stopping where we had. He yelled at us for about five minutes and I was quite upset at his attitude. Nobody had told us where to go and we hadn't stopped until the tracks in front had stopped. I guess the lieutenant had stopped on receiving the small arms fire though I don't believe any of us had been hit. The exec was furious that we hadn't pressed on the additional 400 yards to the village. We left the courtyard and started down the road on foot. I had gone about a hundred yards when we came under fire from the village.

I slid down on the north side of the road embankment trying to see were the fire was coming from but it was getting dark and I couldn' see any thing.t We seemed to have come to a halt. About thirty minutes later I was lying in the dark on the embankment with my gun crew spread out behind me when a Sherman tank came down the road, stopped right next to me, swung his gun over my head, fired three quick rounds and backed away. Not only did he nearly deafen me again but he attracted a lot of attention to my position and then left me to cope with all the return fire. I was so mad I might have shot the tank commander given a chance. During this action, Lloyd Parrish, the track driver for the HQ squad decided to follow the rest of his squad and was killed. Okey Taylor told me that he was a really nice guy and only became boisterous when drinking

Several minutes passed, and the flurry of counter fire subsided and Big Al slid back grabbed my sleeve asking if I was deaf or something. When I told him yes he motioned to the other side of the road and to the west. I picked up my gun gathered the gun team together and started after Big Al's disappearing figure. We moved into the village and located a barn in which to spend the rest of the night. Once in the barn the moon came out and I could make out some of the platoon. One of the riflemen had been wounded and was starting to go into shock. The medic was working on him but was worried that he wouldn't make it through the night because of the cold. I was wearing a poncho and the medic and I wrapped it around the wounded man. I went to each of the doors leading into the barn which consisted of a single large room. Men had been posted at each door and in the moonlight I could make out some of the nearby houses. Across a courtyard about twenty yards from me was a door into a home.

As I stood there in the darkness of the doorway wondering if I could find a nice goose-down quilt there, two German soldiers armed with machine pistols came out of the door and disappeared around the corner. With that I patted the guard at the door on the shoulder and went back into the room and crawled into a haystack to keep warm. I think I was in the second layer of GIs sleeping in the haystack. There were other layers above and below me. In the morning when we all crawled out of the hay it was a pile less than five feet high and ten feet in diameter but it had held about ten soldiers during the night. I later learned that another platoon had moved into an another barn that night and had awakened in the morning to find a bunch of Germans sleeping at the other end of the barn. They had set up a machine gun and then gone down and prodded the Germans awake and sent them back to the POW cage.

We moved out of our barn and there was sporadic firing while we cleared our part of the village of Germans. I moved the gun team to the west side of the town and was lying near the edge of a large field with the houses of the town about fifty feet behind me. I caught a movement in the second story of the house just to my right rear and rolled over firing with my carbine as I rolled. There was some swearing from the house and some one wanted to know what the hell I was shooting at them for. I yelled back not to get behind me in a newly taken town without warning me. Luckily they had seen me start to roll and had ducked just as I fired so no one was hurt. Looking back at the field I couldn't see anything so I decided to move to the platoon's right flank and explore what was happening on the north side of the village.

My gun team had moved to the houses overlooking the road we had come down the night before when I heard the sharp explosion of a tank cannon. Sitting on the road and overlooking the company's half-tracks was a Tiger tank. It had hit the first half-track and as I ran towards it he knocked out the last half-track in the column thereby trapping all the company's vehicles on the raised road. As I ran up to a rock wall about sixty yards from the tank it continued knocking our vehicles out one by one. The tank was positioned so that there was a house just to its left and slightly behind it. There were about ten infantrymen clustered around the tank to give it support. I put my gun up on the wall and started to fire at the infantry. The first few rounds caused the gun to back off the wall. In order to prevent the muzzle from burying itself in the ground, I desperately held the gun up with my right hand while trying to move my left hand from the top of the receiver to the bottom so that I could release the trigger. All the while the gun was firing into the ground between my feet. If it hadn't been so desperate for me it would have been funny. I got control of the gun, replaced it on the wall and, getting a firmer grip, on it started firing again.

As all this was going on a GI with a bazooka came up to the wall and started firing at the tank. I had driven all the infantry away from our side of the tank and, as it backed up, caught them between the stone house and the tank. I put about fifty rounds into the huddled men. Since I was firing from behind them I don't think they realized where the firing was coming from. Finally four of the Germans ran into the house leaving the tank still firing at our vehicles. Another GI joined us with more bazooka rounds and the bazooka team hit the tank about four times. In addition we saw an 81-mm mortar round hit the top of the tank turret. The tank commander completely ignored us and continued firing for another five minutes and then slowly backed towards the west. I watched the house and finally gave it a short burst. By this time the tank had backed off to my left and was out of sight. I yelled at my crew to follow me and started to charge the house shooting as I went. As I crossed the road I hit the dirt at the far side and then realized my gun was out of ammunition. Just then the Germans in the house ran out of the back door and started running west across the field. Grabbing my carbine I fired three rounds at the fleeing Germans and hit one of them. They all went to ground in the field hiding in the two feet high grass.

I turned to Ray for more ammunition and found that we had fired all he had and that Tony hadn't kept up. I yelled for Tony who was twenty yards behind Ray and me to bring up the ammunition he was carrying. He refused saying that he might get shot coming across the road. I yelled back that he better trust that he could make it without being shot by the Germans, because I sure and hell wouldn't miss from twenty yards. Tony reluctantly joined us with his two boxes of ammunition and Ray helped me load the gun. I then started mowing the grass in the field where the German infantry had gone to ground. The German who had made it the farthest into the field bolted across the field. I fired at him for the about twenty seconds as he ran the last 100 yards across the field and dove head long into a hedge at the far edge of the field. He was running almost directly away from me and my shot pattern completely surrounded him. It was a miracle that he had escaped.

I think I must have at least grazed him and I know that I had scared him badly. I then returned to firing at the last spot where I had seen the other Germans. A white handkerchief waved and I stopped firing and yelled, "comen sie hier". Slowly a couple of Germans got up with there hands raised so I got up and walked towards them a few yards motioning for them to walk towards me. They walked a few yards and then bent down to assist a comrade to his feet. I had hit him in the jaw with my carbine and he was bleeding badly. As they approached I yelled for the medic and he soon arrived and was doing what he could for the wounded German . I started moving back to the platoon with the rest of the crew. I didn't bother to look at the bodies that were strewn about the site from which the tank had decimated our tracks.

As we moved back to the platoon I could see the tank that I had been shooting at drawn up behind another Tiger about 200 yards away. I ran back into the village and found a tank destroyer and yelled that there are two Tiger tanks out in the field but this fellow didn't seem any more willing to take on a Tiger than the last tank destroyer I had talked to. I ran back to the field as the commander of my Tiger got out behind the other tank and hooked a cable onto it and towed it off the field. I was so low in ammunition I didn't shoot at him with my machine gun and he was to far away to try with my carbine. I don't know why the men with Garands didn't fire on him. Maybe they were surprised by what he did, but if I'd had an M1, I sure would have taken a couple of shots at him.

After the two tanks disappeared to the west, the company started moving across the field. Several scouts started down one of the creek beds. They were taken under small arms fire, but the rest of us couldn't find the source of fire. There were a large number of small bushes in the field and its surface was cut by a number of creeks that had eroded the field to depths of about five feet. I was then called to bring my gun team forward, and I started down the nearest creek bed with Ray right behind me. After working our way forward to within 100 yards of the next village, I was told to return to our starting point. We had to make our way back about 500 yards of this meandering creak and since I had run most of the way forward I was getting tired.

By the time I got back within a hundred yards of my starting point I was exhausted. I passed a wounded man in the creek bed that was going into shock. Several GIs were clustered around him trying to help. By this time I was out of the creek bed and walking along the top of the bank. My platoon sergeant yelled at me to get down or a sniper would get me. I told him that I was so tired that if I got down I wouldn't be able to get back up. He grabbed me by the ankle and pulled me down. I rested in the creek bed for about ten minutes and finally made my way back to the starting point. Lt. Simino then had me start down a creek to the left of the original one, and fifteen minutes later, my gun team and about three riflemen were position 100 feet from the southeast corner of the town. I had used up nearly all the ammunition I had when they rushed the town. Only one or two Germans opposed us so we took possession of the town.

As we looked around we saw a company of Germans starting a counter attack from the west. I think I had lost Tony again, and I was almost out of ammunition. Ray and I, along with the riflemen, moved into the second story of a house and looked out at the Germans who were approaching in a line of scrimmage about three hundred yards from us. I glanced back east and saw an artillery forward observer walking towards our house. I opened a window and yelled at him to see if he could help us. He climbed up the stairs and peeked out the window. I asked again if he could help and he said sure and started talking into his microphone.

As we watched from our vantage a single air burst blossomed fifty feet over the Germans just to the south of the center of the line. The Germans broke into a trot towards a creek about 150 feet from our house. Next about fifteen shells burst just above the Germans as they jumped into the creek bed. The observer spoke into his radio, and a series of shells started working up the creek bed from both ends of the German's scrimmage line. The Germans moved under a concrete bridge spanning the creek. The observer gave a few more instructions, and there was a simultaneous airburst of nearly fifteen 105-mm shells just above the bridge so that the shrapnel from the exploding shells swept under the bridge and out the west side in a huge cloud of smoke and ruble. A single German staggered out from under the bridge and started back across the field. One of the riflemen started to draw a bead on the lone German when I stopped him saying, "Let him go tell the rest of his outfit what happened, it'll scare the hell out of them."

The rest of the company had started moving into the town as the artillery was demonstrating why the American artillery was considered the best in the world. We bedded down for the night, and the next day our vehicles showed up late in the morning. Our half-track had a two-foot diameter hole in the back door and all of our gear that had been in the back rack was piled into the middle of the half-track. Pastewka told us that the Tiger had hit the rear suspension system and knocked out a bogey wheel and then put a round through the back. He had driven the track into the nearby courtyard using the front wheels. That night the maintenance company fixed the suspension system. We rearranged the stuff that had been in the back rack and prepared to move out.

The following day we were ordered to mount up and move out. Our task force consisted of our company and part of the 80th Tank Battalion. We moved out with our platoon in the lead and with five Shermans interspersed with the tracks. We began rolling across the open fields in an open column without any opposition. After traveling about a half-mile we started getting sporadic small arms fire. Since we were moving at about ten miles an hour it was difficult to isolate the source of fire so I started to fire short burst from my machine gun at any likely source of rifle fire. Since we had nearly ten thousand rounds of 30-caliber machine gun ammunition available I didn't skimp on my firing.

During the day we drove nearly all day pausing only occasionally to deploy against concentrated points of resistance. During the afternoon we were driving to the right of a large town and I was firing down the streets that opened onto the field we were crossing. By this time I must have fired several thousand rounds through the barrel of my gun ,and I noticed that the bullets were badly keyholing. The tracers were forming spirals about five feet in diameter as they trailed away from the gun. I could almost cover the whole street with one bullet. It was time to change the barrel but since that was a five-minute process under the best of conditions and we were bouncing across country I didn't dare try. At one time we started receiving substantial fire from a group of five houses to our right front. Our tanks took the houses under fire, and we continued forward at a slow pace. When we were within three hundred yards of the houses a company of the 80th Tank came over the crest behind it and seeing our assault joined in on our attack. Though they were about a mile from the houses they began scoring hits immediately. The houses were reduced to piles of rubble in a matter of minutes, and we moved on. We learned that our Combat Command Reserve commander Colonel Wallace had been captured the day before when he had become lost trying to reach one of our task forces.

Several fields farther on we started receiving significant small arms fire as we were descending down a slope into a village of about ten houses. We dismounted and the tanks spread out into a line, and we started towards the village at about four miles an hour with the infantry clustered about the tanks. We had gone about half way across the field when there was the sharp report of an eighty-eight. The tanks lurched forward as fast as they could go and the infantry broke into a run. The tanks reached the cover of the houses with the infantry about 100 yards back and sprinting towards the tanks. When we broke into the town there was a short period of firing and the few Germans in the town surrendered. The eighty-eight firing had come from a wooded ridge to our left flank. I took my gun team to that side of the town and decided to check out the houses on the edge of town and more specifically the house to the left flank of the defensive line we were building to face the ridge.

As I moved from one house to the next I was crossing an empty lot that looked out toward the ridge. As I reached the middle of the lot an eighty-eight round cracked over my head and exploded about fifty feet to my left. I dashed for the hedge in front of me as another round hit just to my right but not close enough to harm me. By this time I was moving at full speed and the next round hit the house behind which I made a headlong dive. I couldn't believe that a Tiger tank would try to hit an individual infantryman with his big tank cannon. The rest of the gun team soon joined me, and we moved into the house between the tank and ourselves. Night was coming so the company prepared for the night by putting out outposts. Wwe ate some "K" rations, and I turned in for the night.

The next morning the company spread out and began moving up to the ridge. We didn't receive any fire and things went well for the first hour. When we reached the top of the ridge and proceeded into the woods we crossed the tracks of a Tiger that disappeared into the woods to our left. Two replacements were staring at the wide deep tracks and asked me what had made them. I told them I thought it was a Tiger and one turned to the other and said, "Lets go take a look." I cautioned them to leave it alone and stick with the platoon, but they ignored me and started off on their quest. They hadn't been gone for more than five minutes and the platoon had only moved forward another 100 yards when I heard the sound of cannon fire. There were three rapid shots fired and the two replacements came bursting through the woods towards me. It seems that they had found their Tiger, and it had spotted them. As the Tiger fired on them the brush kept exploding the shells just before they reached the two fleeing GIs. The tank was boring a hole through the woods trying to reach them and they kept putting more tree limbs between them selves and the tank. The two didn't stray from my sight the rest of the day.

We had gone three or four hundred yards into the woods and were crossing a portion of the woods with a little underbrush, a flat forest floor, and trees spaced ten to fifteen feet apart when a German machine gun opened up on us. We all hit the ground and the riflemen fired in the direction from which the sound of the gun had come. After a few minutes of firing it quieted down and we lay among the trees for another five minutes. The lieutenant called out, "Odgers, take your gun and the first rifle squad out to the left flank, and I'll take the rest of the platoon to the right. Got that?" I replied, "Yes sir." I crawled over behind the biggest tree I could find in the immediate vicinity and was starting to cautiously get to my feet when the lieutenant yelled, "Odgers, are you going?" I replied that I had started but preferred to do this very carefully, if he didn't mind. He called back "OK, but don't take all day".

I then stepped out from behind the tree and couldn't see anybody but the few GIs lying in the grass near me. I slowly moved off to the far left of the platoon and came onto a road running towards the spot from were the machine gun fire had come. Pop Bourget was drawing a bead on two German medics in their large flowing white cassocks with big red crosses as they were running down the road. I yelled and asked him what the hell was he doing. Pop replied that one of our medics had been hit and he was going to get even. I told him not while I was there and to knock it off. He grunted and lowered his rifle as Ray and I led a group of several riflemen after the medics. We went about fifty yards down the road till we reached a crossroad. Lying in the roadside ditch were the bodies of three Germans and a machine gun. It appeared that when they had ambushed us the return fire had killed all of them. I couldn't believe how lucky we had been. The platoon had been less than 100 yards from them when they had opened fire yet none of us had been hit and all of them had been killed in the first volley of return fire. It's no wonder that I had been able to advance to their position with out being shot at. Evidently they didn't have any riflemen giving them support, or if they did, they had been abandoned. To our right we heard an exchange of small arms fire and later learned that another veteran had been killed.

We continued through the woods while the task force tanks moved up in open ground on our right flank. Later that afternoon, after traipsing through the woods and traveling for miles, we came to a small group of houses which took about fifteen minutes to clear of Germans. By then it was nearly dark so we set out outposts and prepared for the night. I got some sleep in the second floor of a farmhouse until about two in the morning when the Germans startled me out of my sleep with artillery. I moved downstairs because it made me nervous to be in the second story of frame houses under artillery fire. Within an hour I was told to relieve the outpost in front of the houses. By then a heavy ground fog had formed and it took me a few minutes to find the outpost and relieve the man in the foxhole. I don't remember why I was sent out as a single guard but I wasn't to happy about being by myself out in the fog 30 yards in front of the rest of the company. I'd been there for a short time peering into the fog when five Germans came out of the fog to my left front. They saw me and froze while we stared at each other. They outnumbered me five to one, but I had a machine gun and was protected by my foxhole. We had a mutual draw and they made a sharp left turn and disappeared back into the fog. That was the end of the excitement for the night, and I didn't bother reporting the incident when I was relieved but merely cautioned my relief that there were Germans in the area and to keep his eyes open.

The next morning we started of in the fog, and, at mid morning, we paused near some houses where a few replacements caught up to the company. One was assigned to me for the rest of the day so that I could show him the ropes. We had just stopped when he was brought to me, and he seemed to resent being assigned to a Pfc. for indoctrination. I began digging a foxhole and told him to dig in. He said, "Why, the Germans can't see us in the fog." I replied that they could hear us, and they certainly knew where all the villages were. He ignored me and sat down. The first shell came over about five minutes later and he wanted to join me in my hole even though I pointed out that there was barely room for me. He then started digging as fast as he could, but, before he had gotten more than a foot deep the shelling stopped and he had survived unscratched. From then on for the rest of the day when I relieved myself he relieved himself, when I ate he ate, when I dug he dug, and he was a lot less cocky.

That afternoon the fog cleared and being out in the open we mounted our tracks and continued forward encountering only sporadic small arms fire and an occasional artillery round. In the mid afternoon we came to the top of a rise and below us about a mile away was a huge dam with a small group of houses adjacent to the stream bed leading away from the dam. We started receiving artillery and small arms fire, and the company armorer who had refused to give me the new machine gun was killed while standing next to his track. I was still upset about his refusal to accommodate me, but his death still was depressing. He had modified my old gun to fit my needs, and the modification had been very successful. We soon dismounted and with the tanks charged into the valley below the dam. I ended up on the bank of the streambed about 400 yards from the dam. As I looked up I could see GIs running along the top of the dam checking for explosives. I was hoping they would be successful since, if the dam was blown, I was going to be washed miles downstream.

At about four a hoard of forced labor started pouring across the stream from the far side. They were coming down a road that ran from right to left down the hill on the other side of stream. As I watched the poor starved looking men making their way into our lines I saw a group of three German officers coming down the road on the far side of the workers using them as a shield. They stopped opposite me and started examining our lines with the aid of binoculars. They had moved up slope from the workers to get a better view and I couldn't resist. I opened fire before they realized I was there. My tracers were clearing the heads of the men in front of me by just a few feet. The workers in front of seemed to melt into the ground. Where there had been several hundred men between the Germans and me, I could see nothing but bare ground. I think I hit some of the Germans because when the smoke from my gun and the dust from the stampeding workers cleared there wasn't a German in sight. Ten minutes later the forced laborers reappeared and started streaming into our lines again. That night we stayed in one of the houses at the stream's side. Most of the night I sat at a window starring at a spot of light about fifty yards from the house wondering if was a reflection off a German's wrist watch. I finally gave up when the spot didn't move. The next morning I looked out and saw a small pile of wood chips which had been reflecting the moonlight.