Chapter 12 - The End at Last

We were to stay in Braunschweig for the next five days and I was able to wander about the immediate vicinity of my billeting area. The city had a number of large apartment buildings like the one I was being billeted in. The streets had been kept clear and there wasn't any bomb or artillery damage in the section of the city near me. We were only a few blocks from an airfield, and I did explore it one day.

Sitting out on the field was the biggest tank I have ever seen. The top of the body of the tank was over seven feet off the ground and the turret rose another four feet above the hull. The tracks' return rollers were at my eye level. The tracks must have been nearly four feet wide. The tank hull was over twenty five feet long,, and what remained of the cannon stuck out another ten feet, even though the muzzle end of the barrel had been blown off to incapacitate the tank.

I climbed up onto the tank and looked down inside the turret. The breach of the cannon must have been four feet in diameter. The front armor was set at an angle of approximately 45 degrees and was over ten inches thick. The tank side armor was nearly three inches thick and had been pierced by a shaped charge, which had left a hole about an inch and a half in diameter right under the center of the turret. I thought to myself at the time that, if this thing were out of ammunition, he could have battered you to death by reaching out with that enormous gun and pounding you into the ground. The bore of the gun was about four and a half inches. I also saw a rocket-propelled interceptor and other interesting aircraft. As night was approaching I didn't get a change to exam the aircraft in detail, because I was certainly, at the time, more interested in the armored forces we might still meet.

We met some young German girls on the street, and they were friendly enough that they would stop and talk to us. Two of these girls talked to Ray and me all afternoon and we all had a pleasant time. I was told that some German engineers and scientists were being housed in the town and under our sponsorship, with the idea of interrogating them about German weapons research. The girls may have been members of these families.

There were other young women in town and one of them showed up at our billet one evening after I had gone to sleep. She announced that she wanted one of us to father an American baby for her. I don't know if she believed the Nazi propaganda about the survival of the superior race and had decided that, in the light of recent events that wasn't the Germans. Anyway , when one of my buddies awakened me and asked if I wanted to volunteer, he said I opened my eyes, grunted, and rolled over and went back to sleep. This shows how tired I was.

During our stay in Braunschweig we were taken outside of the city and taught how to block roads by felling trees with blocks of the explosive nitrostarch. I found the exercise interesting but what happened in the middle of the exercise was even more interesting. As we were working in the edge of the woods about fifty yards from the road where our half-tracks were parked we heard antiaircraft guns open up at the rear of the column. As we glanced up from our work an airplane came whistling over the column at an altitude of several hundred feet. As it whizzed by it strafed the row of tracks but didn't hit anyone because we were all up near the woods.

We had been strafed by a German jet fighter. Within two weeks, P-47s and ME-262s had strafed us. The strafing from the ME 262 was over so fast that we didn't have a chance to react. The antiaircraft guns at the front of the column opened up as the fighter was disappearing over the horizon. They must have missed the plane by at least a half-mile. We went on blowing down trees and talking about the strange plane we had seen. The attack by the P-47s frightened me much more than the German strafing had. The first strafing had been initially directed at me personally and had lasted about five minutes while the German strafing was over in a few seconds and had been directed at the mostly empty vehicles. The first strafing had caused a lot of resentment while the second was a subject of intense interest to us because of the type of plane involved.

On the twentieth of April we were told to mount up and prepare for action. We moved out in a column to the southeast of Braunschweig at mid morning. In the early afternoon we passed through Halberstadt which I recognized as the name given a World War I German fighter plane. On leaving Halberstadt we swung to the southwest. We finally came to a halt at mid afternoon, and we were just north of a pretty little town nestled in the foothills of a east west running range of what was classified in Europe as mountains, though in California they would have been classified as hills. I later learned that the mountains were the Hartz, and the town was Blankenburg. The 58th AIB had been detached from CCR and assigned to CCB to clean out an area of resistance between the Ninth Army and the First Army to our south.

The road our column was on ran along an open field about three quarters of a mile from Blakenburg, and we had an unobstructed view of the proceedings. We sat in our tracks for about an hour as negotiations for the surrender of the town went on. Eventually, several P-47s came over and worked the town over for about fifteen minutes. While this was going on, several companies of tanks deployed in an east west line about 800 yards from the town. As the tanks and our supporting 105-mm howitzers took the town under fire, the infantry battalion in front of us attacked the town. Soon some of the buildings in the town were on fire, and ,as night fell, we dismounted from our tracks and followed the lead battalion into town. By the time we reached the town, it was dark and the burning houses lighted the town, along with the explosions of artillery and tank fire and streams of machine gun tracers. It gave the town a surrealistic look as we moved up the main street behind a tank. About midnight firing died down, and we were told to move into a house, post sentinels, and bed down for the night.

The squad had moved into a very beautiful home with gorgeous furniture. The home was a three-story house, and we moved into the top floor and began to bed down in two of the large bedrooms. We had just gotten settled when the woman of the house stormed into our room and told us to get out of her house. Now this was a woman who was seriously out of touch with reality. I don't know whether she mistook us for German troops or was so used to having her way that she thought she could order the American army to do her bidding. We politely told to go back down to the cellar, but she continued to rave at us and demand that we leave. Finally one of our German speaking Gis told her that she had better get back to the cellar or we would toss her out the window. She still continued to yell and swear at us and it was only after one of us opened the window and two others started towards her did she seem to come to her senses. She went screaming out of the room and down the steps.

I can't, to this day, understand her actions that came close to causing her death. She was evidentially the wife of a high party official or a wealthy industrialist and was used to getting her way. No one had ever offered to throw her out of a third story window before, and this threat finally brought her to understand her current position in life. The Russians later moved into this area, and, if she survived, our indoctrination of her as to her changed circumstances may have saved her life.

The next day we moved south of Blankenburg to clear the hills to the southwest of the town. Although these mountains weren't very high they were extremely steep. I can remember climbing up a hill where I had to shove my gun up the hill and secure it behind a shrub and pull myself up until I could find a foothold. I had spent about ten minutes working up a hill when I lost the gun and it slid all the way to the bottom of the hill and I had to slide down and start all over again. I couldn't have used the gun in this terrain, because there was no way to establish a field of fire. We spent all day looking for Germans and I think we found two. At the end of the day both Ray who had been carrying his M1 and two boxes of ammunition, were exhausted. I don't think anyone else was ready for a mile run. As we were returning back towards town I laid the gun down and told Al that if he wanted it back in town he could carry it himself. He picked it up, but, within a few hundred yards he found a cart to carry the gun. We never left the road until we reached town.

That night I was assigned outpost duty, and, during the night a group of about eighty Germans came down the road in close march formation. I stopped them and yelled for help. A German officer came forward and offered the GI with me something. My buddy refused to take it so the officer turned to me and I accepted. It turned out to be a beautiful P-38 pistol that was his personnel side arm. When my companion saw what it was he wanted me to give it to him. I told him fat chance. By this time help had arrived and the whole bunch were marched off to a POW enclosure. Ray Pastewka recently told me that he had a similar incident and collected a P-38, binoculars, and a compass and got them home as war souvenirs.

The next day I spent about an hour leaning how to disassemble and reassemble the pistol. When we went off looking for more Germans that afternoon I took the pistol and my carbine and left the machine gun behind. As we were climbing a slightly wooded incline, I decided that I'd better put a round in the chamber of the pistol so I pulled back the slide and pushed the safety on. The gun went off and a bullet plowed into the ground next to me. I cursed and looked up. The whole platoon had disappeared into bushes or behind trees. When I called out that I did it, there were a lot of dirty looks and a lot of foul language.

I thought it was kind of funny but didn't say anything as we started up the slope again. I kept the pistol with me even though we were told to turn all souvenir weapons in. I finally decided to comply when I had been transferred to the Fourth Armored Division. When I was leaving the Fourth Armored to come home I went to the orderly room to get my pistol back but it had disappeared. I never saw the pistol again. When I complained, the first Sargent told me to take another weapon out of the footlocker and stop trying to cause trouble. I pulled out a Belgium made 32 automatic with a Nazi emblem. This weapon I found didn't have any of the safety quirks of the P-38 and I still have it.

By the end of the month we had been moved ten or fifteen miles west of Blankenburg and were acting as occupation troops. We were still taking occasional causalities from ambushes by stray small groups of SS troops and had to stay on a reasonable level of alertness. I was assigned the job of riding shotgun on a large wagon of hay. I rode on top of the pile of hay being towed by a wood-burning tractor. I must have been sitting eight feet of the ground on this huge pile of hay. I wasn't sure why anyone would want a wagon of hay and it made me nervous to be off by myself, sitting up on in the air making a pretty good target. Possibly the farmer had been an anti-Nazi and was afraid of retaliation.

I also had the time to have my teeth looked at by a dentist. He found a cavity on one of my front upper teeth and filled it using a drill driven by hand by his assistant. The chair was sitting under a larg,e spreading tree and it was a very pleasant site. The dentist told me to get the tooth looked at as soon as I got out of the army. I did, but every dentist that looked at the filling pronounced it fine until I was over forty years old. This was the second dentist who had treated me in two years and both were very kind and did beautiful work. We also got a complete set of shots, about the third set since I had been in Europe. I think the army felt it was cheaper or easier to give everybody shots every two or three months than keep records. Most of the shots we were getting were good for years.

I started smoking because of a bad set of nerves but gave it up within a few months when I found that I could sell a cartoon of cigarettes, which I got free, for ten dollars.

As the pressure of combat subsided I found that my hands started shaking. The shaking got worse and worse until I could no longer keep more than a quarter of a glass filled with water. It got so I had to use both hands to drink. I don't remember whether any of the others were suffering from stress withdrawal as I was, but no one said anything to me about my shakes. The war in Europe had essentially ended for us and we expected to be shipped home and then sent to the Pacific.