11. Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany
February - May, 1945

After leaving Roermond, we crossed the Roer River and spent several days attacking the towns in the Rhineland on the way to the Rhine River. Most of the towns were nameless to us but I remember some of the larger ones we passed through or helped capture - Grefath, Rheinberg, Munchen-Gladbach and Moers. We were to try to capture a railroad bridge over the Rhine near Moers. If the Germans had not been successful in blowing it up, we may have been as famous as our friends in the 9th Armored Division were when they captured the railroad bridge at Remagen.

We moved very fast during this period. It was almost impossible for the infantryman to really know where we were or what we captured. Occasionally we would see a sign telling us the name of a town but we never knew whether our outfit had captured it or whether we were just passing through to get to the next town. Sometimes we would ride for a while, hear firing or fire ourselves, and then get back in the half-tracks and ride some more without really knowing what had happened or what the hell was going on.

We worked a lot with the 35th Infantry Division on our way to the Rhine River. We would relieve them and move for a day or so and they would relieve us. I think our areas probably overlapped a little and we were trying to keep out of each other's way. There is one universal statement you can make about the infantry - they never know where they are or what was going on.

One day while we were relieving elements of the 35th, some men in the unit we were to replace said that there were some snipers in the area and one of their men were trying to eliminate them. They said this guy was usually half drunk and he would walk down the street until the sniper shot at him and then he could find out where the sniper was and kill him. It apparently worked because a few minutes later we heard some shots and a guy came back up the street, joined his friends and left.

We advanced toward the Rhine with the 35th Infantry on our left and the 84th Infantry to our right. The Germans blew up the bridge across the Rhine near Mors just before we got there so we were relieved around the 10th or 11th of March and moved back to let the infantry divisions continue on. There wasn't much else we could do until a bridgehead was established across the Rhine.

Around March 4th or 5th we pulled back from the Rhine to the German town of Krefeld where we stayed for a few days. We also were in the town of Munchen-Gladbach but I don't think we captured it. We captured many other smaller German towns on our way to the Rhine, which I don't remember the names of even if I ever knew them.

After we were relieved and moved back to Krefeld, we mainly performed maintenance on our equipment, had a little training and went on patrols. The patrols were mounted using one of the half-tracks. We had a driver and one or two men and we were told to patrol in any direction we wanted to and to run at least two, maybe three a night but not to be consistent. I was in charge on one of the patrols probably two or three times while we were stationed there. We had local maps and tried to pick a route which would take us out ten or fifteen miles to make a big circle since we didn't want to take the same route back as we did going out.

On one of my patrols we crossed a wide highway. A column of large transport vehicles went down the road toward the Rhine shortly after we had crossed. The vehicles were carrying Navy LCI craft to be used in a few days for crossing the Rhine. They were so wide that they blocked the entire road. It took us quite a while to get back to our area because we couldn't get past them. We wandered around looking for a way back and wound up in the Fifth Armored Division area. I think the 5th Armored was in the First Army at that time which meant we were completely out of the Ninth Army area. They had some maps and showed us how to find our way back.

On the 7th of March, the Ninth Armored Division of the First Army captured a railroad bridge over the Rhine near the German town of Remagen. It threw the Germans in a panic and confused the Americans even more because they hadn't planned to try crossing the Rhine for another two weeks. We heard that Patton was restrained from exploiting the bridgehead and was told to expand and secure it for two weeks until it fit the grand plan of crossing the Rhine in the North toward the end of March. I don't know if it was true or not.

The engineers had a big blast while we were in Krefeld. We were resting in an apartment building, our first inside quarters since leaving England, when there was this terrific blast just outside. It blew the roofs off all the apartment buildings and blew out all the windows. Fortunately no one was hurt but it sure scared the hell out of us. The engineers had detonated a big pile of captured German land mines just across a field in front of the apartments. They apparently didn't know just how powerful the mines were and they said that they had put 50 or 60 of them in the pile.

This was the first time since leaving the ship in November that we had finally got some quarters where we were inside out of the elements and the engineers came along blew the roof off of it. Needless to say we were pissed.

While we were waiting to cross the Rhine River, we spent some time in destroying German rifles, which we had captured. About all we did was to break the firing pins and stocks of the rifles. We also disposed of a little of our ammunition in the process. The Rhine River was now between the U.S. and the German lines, with some high voltage power lines going close to it. Since we were not doing much and had some time on our hands, we shot a few rifle grenades and bazooka rounds at the towers and lines to see if we could hit anything. We didn't of course. We later learned that the Germans had not cut the power going through the power lines and that the Americans were using it.

Sometime during this period we found a shot up vehicle with a command radio and all the crystals intact. We took it to one of our friends in maintenance who hooked it up for us and after we found the proper crystals, we could pick up some good Armed Forces Radio music to listen to. We hadn't heard any radio news or good music since December. The nice thing about it was that we could listen to the music and it would cut out anytime command messages for us would come over from batallion headquarters. We could also get other command channels from other 8th units when we put in the correct crystals. I do not think they would have approved of this but there was no one around to tell us not to do it.

On March 22nd, they began to bombard the eastern side of the Rhine. We sent some of our tanks and field artillery to help. Most of the artillery in the Ninth Army area was used to fire at the eastern bank of the river. The area was also bombed by the air force. I later learned that one of the bomber pilots was a high school classmate and distant relative, Dorsel Jackson.

By March 24th, the Ninth Army was across the Rhine. There had been a massive drop of paratroops behind the German lines after the bombing stopped. They overran the German artillery positions which had been set up to stop a Rhine crossing and thus made it much easier on the infantry and engineers who were crossing in the Navy LCI's and in rubber assault boats.

The 8th Armored Division was the first armored division to cross the Rhine in the Ninth Army sector. We crossed on Mar. 27, 1945 near the town of Wesel. Being in an armored division was nice since we got to wait until the infantry and engineers had crossed the river, established a bridgehead, and built a bridge for us. Crossing the Rhine began on the night of Mar. 23rd by the infantry and engineers. An airborne drop behind the German lines, which made the crossing easier, preceded our crossing. During the next few days, the Germans sent many aircraft over the crossings to try to knock out the bridges but I don't think they were very successful.

After the engineers had built a pontoon bridge across the river, we went across. I can't recall now whether we crossed in late afternoon or after dark but I do know that it was a harrowing ride. All they have over the pontoons are two tracks, which you stay in while you are crossing. The Rhine river is almost as big as the Mississippi or at least it seems like it when you are riding in a half-track about three feet above the water. It also seemed like it took us an awful long time to cross but I'm sure it wasn't as long as I remember. I do remember that we were worried about air attacks and had all our machine guns ready.

The Ninth Army had crossed the Rhine north of the Ruhr industrial area and the First Army crossed south of it. They were to encircle it and cut off the war supplies that were being produced there. The 2nd Armored Division of the Ninth Army and the 3rd Armored Division of the First Army took off in spearhead attacks to try to encircle the Ruhr Valley.

While the 2nd and 3rd Armored divisions were moving to surround the Ruhr, we were moving east into the middle of the industrialized area. The area seemed like it was one big city but we would occasionally pass a road sign that would tell us we were going into another town.

We spent the next few days attacking German positions in the Ruhr. My unit attacked and captured the towns of Feldhausen and Kirchellen during this period. Other elements of the division captured Dorsten. We ran into heavy resistance as we approached the town of Recklinghausen. This was in the heavily industrialized section of the Ruhr. It looked a lot like the area around the plants in So. Charleston, W. Va. - just one plant after another.

After a few days of moving east or whatever direction we were going, the division received orders to go around the outside of the Ruhr pocket to the vicinity of Lippstadt and then to attack toward Paderborn to the east. This was shortly after the 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions had joined up there. We pulled out of the line and began preparations to go around the pocket.

The 329th Regiment of the 83rd Infantry Division relieved us. We received orders to move south and southeast when we arrived at Lippstadt instead of east toward Paderborn as we expected. One of the units that we had been fighting near Recklinghausen was the German 116th Panzer Division.

We hardly ever knew where we were or just what towns we had captured or even if we had captured them. We were almost constantly relieving some other unit or being relieved by them. Even though we occasionally knew what town we were in we rarely knew who had taken it. Some of the infantry divisions that we worked with were the 75th, the 79th, the 83rd, the 35th and the 95th divisions. I think we saw more of the 35th than the rest but we worked with them all at one time or another.

To get to Lippstadt, we crossed the Lippe River on a pontoon bridge near Dorsten and I think we went through or near Haltern and Munster. A lot of the move was made at night so it is hard to be sure exactly where we were or what towns we passed through but we wound up in a town called Selm around April 2.

After we arrived at Lippstadt a couple of days later, we began moving off to the southwest. We hadn't gone but a short distance when we ran into a couple of Panther tanks that were sitting off to the right in some trees. I don't know why our tanks didn't fire but they started to back down the road. My squad was the first infantry half-track in the column and the tank in front of us backed up over our half-track and broke it's axle. Needless to say, this pissed-off the platoon leader Lt. Siminoe considerably. The rest of us weren't too happy either because we lost our supplies, cigarettes, etc and had to double up with other units for a while. Of course, everyone except the half-track driver had bailed out as soon as the tanks were spotted.

The rest of the half-tracks in the column tried to get off of the road before getting hit or run over. One of them was close to a driveway leading into a German farmhouse so the driver headed down it to get into the courtyard. The German opened fire and blew up the back end rack where we usually carried all our bedrolls, duffel bags and anything else that we didn't have on us. The driver didn't get hurt but it scared the hell out of him.

For the next week or so we moved southwest into the Ruhr pocket. We either captured or helped to capture towns like Soest, Unna and Hamm. We captured many other small towns as we moved southwest but I never knew the names of most of them. Some of them are listed in the 8th Armored Division history titled 'In Tornado's Wake' by Cap't Charles Leach.

As we moved from Lippstadt to Soest, our half-track driver Cpl. Lloyd Parrish was killed. We were attacking toward Soest and ran into a strong point. The half-track drivers usually stayed with the vehicles but on this day, Lloyd decided he wanted to see what was going on so he took an M1 rifle and came up to where the fighting was going. He got hit in the head by rifle fire as he was looking over an embankment. It was always my opinion that if you aren't required to be there, stay the hell out of the area.

We were walking down a back road someplace in the Ruhr Pocket on the night of April 12, 1944 when we heard that President Roosevelt had died. It's funny how you can remember things like that. I can still visualize the surroundings when we heard the news. It was after dark and we were making a night march for some reason. Later that night the road turned to the left and we marched in front of another column from our outfit coming down another road. We were lucky that someone didn't get killed before we found out who they were or vice versa.

The Germans were still trying to breakout of the pocket and we ran into columns of tanks occasionally. We had four P-51's attached to our column during this time and we would call them up as needed to strafe the Germans. In order for them to identify us from the air, we would put out colored panels in front of our position and they could attack anything on the other side. The panels were a bright cerise color (purplish pink) and were about 4 feet by 12 feet in size. They were so bright that you could hardly look at them in the sunlight.

One day during this period we ran into a column that had quite a few tanks in it so we called on the Air Corps. We were on top of a ridge in some houses and the noble birdmen apparently forgot that we were moving west and were east of the Germans so they flew over our panels and started shooting at us instead of the Germans. If you want something that will really scare the hell out of you that is it. Things like that almost made you feel sorry for the Germans but not quite. Each plane has eight fifty-caliber machine guns shooting armor-piercing ammunition, which can go clear through a wooden building. Getting strafed by the Air Corp is bad but was still not nearly as bad as an artillery barrage.

My platoon sergeant Bill McClain got caught outside and was strafed during this air attack. The planes put four streams of .50 caliber bullets down each side of him. Fortunately they didn't hit him but they scared the hell out of him - and us too. The planes made a couple of passes before they were called off. The column lost a couple of 6x6 trucks and a jeep before they left though. We were lucky no one was killed or hit. Now we knew what the Germans were faced with when the Air Corps was around.

We were on this ridge all day and had one of the best meals we had had in months. We were in a German farmhouse where they raised chickens. We ate fresh eggs and good heavy German bread until we couldn't hold any more. We had lunch and dinner both there and really filled up on fresh eggs. I think I ate over a dozen and a half of them.

Shortly after this, friendly fire hit Bob Edge. Bob had come in as a replacement to my squad and we had become friends. We were on a ridge again and had dug in when the tanks joined us. All was peaceful until they came up and started firing. Bob was sitting on the edge of his foxhole when one of the tanks fired into a fence post beside Bob. The shrapnel hit a pistol he was wearing at his side. If it hadn't been for the pistol, he probably would have been killed. I heard from him later and he said the medics had pulled a few pieces of pistol out of him.

There was considerable talk about the death of President Roosevelt but I do not think most of us had ever heard of Harry S. Truman. Anyway, the talk didn't last long and we went on about our business.

About this time, the Ruhr pocked had been reduced enough so were relieved and ordered to move east again. The attack into the Ruhr had been expensive. The 58th AIB had 137 men killed or wounded during the two or three week campaign. Most historians have agreed that there was really no need to reduce the Ruhr pocket. It would have withered on the vine and the German troops would have surrendered if we had waited for a while longer.

After we left the Ruhr pocket it was hard to tell what towns we captured and which ones we were just passing through. Some of the larger towns I had heard of but most of them were so small that they were not on any map that I have ever seen. The 2nd Armored Division was ahead of us with a spearhead to the Elbe but I don't know what roads they had taken. I always assumed that if someone shot at you as you passed then you captured that town but if you just passed though then someone else had taken it but that was not necessarily true either. I suppose the commanders or the historians might know but we sure didn't.

We went through Paderborn and other German towns like Hamelin and Hildesheim. Combat Command B of the division was sent to Wolfenbuttel to protect the southern flank of the 2nd Armored and 83rd Infantry who were moving toward the Elbe River. I was in Combat Command C and we followed later and went to Braunschweig first and then south to Halberstadt and Blankenburg. Wolfsburg where they make Volkswagens is only a few miles north of Braunschweig but I do not know if we captured it or not.

We captured a lot of German towns during our move to Blankenburg. Most of them just surrendered as we approached. They would indicate their surrender by hanging white towels or bedclothes out of the upstairs windows. This was fine as long as no one shot at us as we approached. Occasionally a fanatic SS man would take a shot at us as we closed in on the town. We would then call on the tanks to fire white phosphorus shells into the town. After about half of the buildings were on fire we usually didn't have any more trouble. Word spread to the other German towns in the area rather fast.

The 8th Armored did capture a German concentration camp during this period. It was the Halberstadt-Zwieberge camp near Langenstein, Germany. It was a sattlelite of the Buchenwald concentration camp. I do not which of our units were involved or exactly when it occured. The days seemed to run together during this period.

We had trouble from a lot of very young German kids during this period. They had been encouraged by the SS troops to snipe at us or to shoot a Panzerfaust (anti-tank grenade) at the tanks and then surrender. That didn't work either. If we caught them before they had killed or wounded anyone, they had their pants pulled down and were spanked in front of the whole town. It they had killed or wounded one of our men someone would usually shoot them. Word like that gets around to the Germans very fast

A sniper killed James Johnson during one of the attacks on a small town. Several other men were wounded. There were at least two snipers in the town at the time. One of them had been pinpointed in an upstairs window in a house at the edge of town. We called up a tank that put a round through the window and we didn't hear any more from that one. The one who shot Jim was in another building. A tank shot a couple of white phosphorus grenades into it and set it on fire. After the building was burning good, the sniper came running out. He threw down his rifle and tried to surrender but that's not the way it works. Someone shot him.

We arrived in the outskirts of Blankenburg around Apr. 20 and pulled into the suburbs just as it was getting dark. There were no tanks in front of us for some reason and my half-track was the lead vehicle. As we rounded a corner in town we ran into what seemed to be a roadblock 30 or 40 feet away. That is the fastest we cleared the half-track the whole time I was in the army. After we got regrouped we found that it was a Tiger tank and it was blocking the whole road. We captured the crew in a nearby house drinking coffee or something stronger. They said they had run out of gas and decided the war was over so they might as well surrender. We sure approved of that decision because they could have blown us halfway out of Germany if they had manned the tank and fired at us.

The Nordhausen concentration camp was about thirty miles south of Blankenburg. Because of all the units in the area, I have no idea who actually captured it. The 8th Armored was in the area but I don't know if one of our units was involved or not. The 330th infantry regiment of the 83rd Infantry division was also in the area. I was to get transferred to the 330th in September.

The rumors going around at the time said that the German SS troops were going to organize and make a stand somewhere in the Hartz Mountains. In order to prevent this, we were sent into the mountains to round up any Germans we could find. There wasn't too much organized resistance by this time but small bands of SS troops were still roaming the area and you could still get killed if you weren't careful.

About the last combat efforts we made in the war was to clear the woods and forests south of Blankenburg and attempt to link up with the 1st Army, which was moving up from the south. We finished this on about the 21st of April and then we essentially went on occupation duty in the Hartz Mountains. We took over the area of Clausthal-Zellerfeld for a time.

We spent the next few days in the surrounding territory mostly on patrol to keep down any German resistance. I don't think we were shot at all after we finished clearing Blankenburg. The war ended a week or ten days later. When we heard that the war was over there was little celebration. One guy went out and fired a couple of rounds into the air but not much else happened. The war seemed to have ended for us about a week earlier. After clearing Blankenburg and the surrounding towns, it became very quiet all things considered. We went on regular patrols but not much was happening in our area.

After the war ended, we moved from Blankenburg through Goslar to a little town called Duderstadt. It was a nice little town. The towns in central Germany were in pretty good shape if they hadn't offered any resistance and Duderstadt was one of them. There was a small lake just east of town with a dance pavilion and bar in it so we commandeered it for partying. The non-fraternization ruling was in force then but no one paid much attention to it because there was no one around to enforce it.

Bill Fulton, one of my roommates in ASTP was in the MP's and was stationed in our area. He would come over to our parties. He would come to town in his jeep and then take off his armband, leave his jeep in town and ride over to the lake with us. It really shook up some of the people when they found out he was an MP but he was one of the good guys. He said he arrested one man the whole time he was an MP and that was an officer who got smart with him.

There was an old German at the lake who ran the rowboat concession. He didn't charge us for boats of course and was a lot of fun to talk to. He spoke a little English and liked to practice speaking it. He wanted to know if all the guys were married or not and like to talk about all kinds of things. His favorite expression to the married men who were partying was 'Ven der sun goes down in der west, der wedding ring goes down in der vest.'

We used to go back and forth to the lake a lot and one time when I was returning I passed the battalion commander Lt. Col. Artman who was going the other direction. I was outside the half-track sitting on the armor-plated driver's shield with my feet on the engine hood when Col. Artman came down the road in his jeep. I didn't know what else to do so I jumped up on the hood and saluted as we sailed past. I don't know who was the most surprised. Needless to say we didn't lose any getting out of there before he figured out what was going on and turned around. One half-track and one GI looks a lot like any other so he didn't stand a chance of finding out who it was once we got back to town.

While we were in Duderstadt we got orders to dispose of all of our fragmentation and white phosphorus hand grenades. I got assigned to this detail and I think Andy Phillips was with me. We had always had a mild rivalry and today was no different. We took the grenades to the top of a cliff and were supposed to pull the pins and throw them over the edge to let them explode.

Of course Andy and I found a more clever way to dispose of them. The cliff was about as high as the trees at the bottom so decided we would see who could blow the top out of a tree with a grenade. This of course was a very silly way for us to dispose of the grenades and could very easily have resulted in us blowing the top out of us instead of a tree. We would pull the pin on a grenade, count to one or two and then throw it so it would explode just as it cleared the top of the cliff and went into the trees. Fortunately none of the grenades had short fuses so we survived the episode but I don't think either of us managed to hit a tree either.

While we were stationed in Duderstadt we went over to Gottingen for a parade honoring General Devine who had been promoted to Major General. Gottingen is one of the old cities in Germany and has a long history. It was finally nice to be able to see a few of the historical towns and sites in Germany.