“Hester has been hit! Get the radio!”
After they docked in England in mid-November of 1944, my father’s battalion was loaded onto troop carriers and sent across the English Channel to Le Havre where they then joined up with General Patton’s 3rd Army. The science nerd from Virginia, excited to be going overseas for the first time, was heading to the front.
The port at Le Havre had been heavily damaged by air raids. In one big, flattened area there was a single surviving little white cottage surrounded by flowers. It turned out not to be a house at all, but a disguised German pillbox. Pillboxes were small concrete bunkers with tiny windows from which Nazi troops could fire their weapons and be relatively protected from return fire. While they only looked big enough to hold a couple of men, many of them extended many stories down into the ground and had dozens of rooms below, filled with equipment and officers. The Germans had built a whole series of them along the border in a chain that came to be known as the Siegfried Line. When the allies landed at Normandy on D-Day and started pushing inland, they reclaimed large areas of Europe but could not get beyond this line.
Once they got to France, my dad’s troop carrier went through a series of locks and started to make its way up the Seine River. The soldiers enjoyed themselves on the day-long cruise. Some played craps, others sunbathed. My dad, however, stood on deck and looked out at the countryside. On the north side of the river were a lot of abandoned rusty shells of trucks and tanks that had probably been there since the Battle of France that had been fought four years before. Many brick and stone houses on both sides of the river lay in ruins. It wasn’t quite what he was expecting to see but, of course, there was a war on. The battalion disembarked near the city of Rouen, and they all pitched their tents in a field alongside a muddy stretch of road.
All through his life, Dad told war stories that often seemed to involve his buddy Smitty. Wherever Dad was, there was Smitty. They seemed to have gone through the entire war together. Smitty was married, so back at Fort Jackson had spent every free moment he could in town with his wife. It was only once they landed in Europe that the two got to be friends. Each soldier carried half a pup tent with him, so Dad and Smitty started bunking together.
Theodore Smith was a farmer from Pennsylvania and, in my father’s words, “had more practical good sense than anyone I ever knew.” That first day in the field, Smitty saw a haystack and got my father to help him grab some hay from it to put under their tent. They ignored the hick, country boy comments from their fellow soldiers and hunkered down. After that first cold, uncomfortable night in the field, everyone else soon headed over to the haystack, too, until their CO forced them to stop. The French were our allies, after all. Stealing property was not why the army was there. After a few days, when they finally moved out, Smitty took some of the dirty straw and packed it into the floor of the jeep to keep their feet warm. Everybody laughed at them again. Until it got colder.
Dad’s unit consisted of two jeeps, one of which was driven by Smith. Each Jeep had a couple of wire corporals whose job was to unspool the wire and set up the radio as close to the front as they could get. One of those was my dad. They also carried a radio operator, two riflemen for protection, and two officers, a captain and a sergeant who oversaw them all. And the portable radio. The wire corporal job had seemed like a great idea back in the States, but now that they were on the road moving towards the fighting, my father started questioning his decision. He realized that he didn’t really know what he was doing.
Even though they were moving closer to the fighting, everyone was more than happy to leave that field behind. A few days had turned it into a freezing, muddy mess. Their latrines were a pair of slit trenches dug just beyond the last of the tents. Nothing could be as bad as that.
In one of the villages that they drove through, a German soldier, who had been hiding in a hayloft for two weeks, appeared and surrendered to the Americans. He had been terrified to come out before because he had a pretty good idea about what the French locals might have done to him. He was a young skinny guy with scraggly whiskers and a wrinkled uniform. He didn’t look anything like the superhuman Nazi ideal the fresh Americans had seen in pictures. My father was surprised that this guy looked younger than they did.
The German Army had only been pushed out of Metz, France by the Third Army a week or two before on November 20th. Some enemy stragglers were still holding out in the big forts outside the city, but inside it was now safe enough for the troops to walk around. They were billeted inside a hospital for a few days. While Dad was there, somebody thought to teach him how to repair telephone wire.
Patton was heading towards the Saar region of Germany, hoping to break through the Siegfried line, so that’s where Dad was going too. The Saar is just east of Luxembourg. After World War I, it had been given to France by the League of Nations. In a 1935 referendum, 90% of its inhabitants agreed that it should become a part of Germany, instead. After the war, there was a short period during which it became an autonomous protectorate with its own money and stamps. Now, it’s part of Germany again.
As they got to the Saar, their convoy arrived at a big stone barn somewhere just behind the front. A rifle belonging to somebody who had either been killed or wounded was lying in the dirt by the big wooden door. Nobody seemed to notice it. Nothing was quite as orderly as it had been back in training.
The unit set up a radio behind the spot where a captain was directing the artillery to fire. As Dad describes it, “The fields or pasture in front of the barn extended down a long slope to a small stream. On the other side, the ground rose at a similar slope and the pasture ended at some woods. The rifle companies were not visible but were on the ground in front of the woods. The Germans were somewhere between them and the woods, or perhaps in the woods. We could hear a continual exchange of rifle fire coming from the area.” A German tank came out of the woods and the captain ordered the guns to aim toward it. Eventually, they disabled it. Then they heard the high-pitched shriek of a German 88mm gun which stopped abruptly with the sound of several tremendous explosions that were close enough to make the ground shake. It was terrifying. “The war had taken on an entirely new dimension for us.”
“All you could do when you heard the incoming shells was to throw yourself on the ground and lie as flat as possible. Although I continued to go to church and believe that the moral principles of Christianity should be followed, I had ceased to be a sincere believer when I was a young teenager. However, as I lay there with the possibility of being blown into nothingness any second, I prayed that it wouldn’t happen. And it didn’t. “
“They said that you would not be able to hear the shell that was going to hit you because the shell was traveling faster than sound. However, that shell might be right behind other shells that you could hear. In any event, we wasted no time calculating such things. Once a shell hit there was a tremendous explosion followed by the sound of bits of shrapnel and debris raining down. Sometimes the screaming from the projectile would end with a sharp thud and no explosion. This meant it had either been an armor-piercing shell meant for a tank or a faulty, “dud” shell that failed to detonate. Sometimes the explosion would send one of the shell fragments spinning with a high-pitched sound quite different from the one the shell made before it hit the ground. The appearance of shell fragments lying on the ground afterward did not help matters. Many were pieces close to a foot long, perhaps an inch wide and a half-inch thick with sharp jagged edges. When Kipling used the phrase “reeking tube and iron shard” I knew exactly what he was talking about.”
It all got very real, very quickly. “A day or so later we saw our first dead body, a German with wide-open eyes staring at the sky and a deep, triangular, red hole in the middle of his forehead. This was bad enough but soon we saw our first dead American, with a uniform and equipment identical to our own… One day we were accompanying the infantry on foot, and they started retreating. There was some small arms fire up ahead. As I joined the rush to the rear a young infantryman was lying in a shallow ditch beside the road. He was apparently paralyzed with fear. I was scared enough myself but stopped and told him to get up or he would be killed there. He wouldn’t.”
“Later a German shell knocked out one of our jeeps parked in front of the warehouse. Fortunately, nobody was in it at the time. The jeep had a big hole centered about where the radio had been, behind the driver’s seat. The remainder of the vehicle was full of hundreds of small holes that left only a hunk of material resembling steel wool vaguely shaped like the jeep. The captain had left his raincoat in the vehicle, and it was totally shredded.”
As human beings, it seems that we can get used to anything. As a matter of course, when they were lucky enough to get hot food, the men would stand on the chow line five feet apart in case they were shelled. When they got their food, they’d scatter even further apart so as not to create a big target. While that might have made people anxious at first, after a while it just became a habit. Having seen how quickly we all got used to social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, I can see how it would all come to seem normal in a very short time. You either get used to living with the constant terror and adapt to it, or you go mad. “A man in another of our three liaison sections lost his head under fire. He ran around, exposing himself to enemy fire, and then headed for the rear. He told somebody that he knew everybody would consider him a damned coward, but he couldn’t help it.”
When I was in my twenties, I was an extremely nervous flier. My sister worked for one of the major network morning news shows as a producer and was constantly out in the field at airline crash sites. Any bump or lurch while I was flying, and I’d grab onto the armrests with a death grip. On one flight, I sat next to someone who was a total wreck for the entire time. Sweat and fear flowed out of them in waves. All I could think was, “I’m not nearly as scared as that guy.” Somehow seeing somebody with that extreme reaction simply erased all the terror I felt. I have never really had a problem flying since. Certainly, there are times when I think, “OK, this is it, we’re going down,” but it’s nervousness, thank goodness, not panic.
I cannot begin to imagine what it was like for my father, or anyone else for that matter, those first couple of weeks on the front line. I can, however, imagine him getting used to whatever it was. Not liking it, being scared all the time, and probably always wanting it to end, I have no doubt, but accepting it as part of existence that can’t be changed. That, I can picture. He learned to tell the difference between the sounds of guns. He could tell when they were close and when they were far away. Without thinking, he knew when the shells overhead were ours and when they were theirs. Seeing the guys who fell apart, probably made his own inner resolve stronger. Not that they were so much weaker, but that they had the misfortune to lose it first.
At some point, much later, after the Battle of the Bulge when the Allied forces were finally pushing passed the Siegfried line, Dad was carrying the radio, behind his captain, across an open pasture. The Germans started dropping mortar shells all around them. “They say you cannot hear an artillery shell if it is going to hit you, but I believe I heard a mortar shell coming very close to me… I hit the ground face down just as the shell exploded showering me with clods of soil. I did not know whether I had been hit or not. I must have lay there a few seconds. When I looked up my helmet was off, and my vision was very blurred… It finally dawned on me that along with my helmet my glasses had been knocked off. I put them and the helmet back on, picked up the radio and continued running towards the little stone building. The captain wasn’t sure I was OK. I was very shaken but managed to tell him I was OK.”
Later that night, Smitty told him that when he hit the ground after the mortar exploded that the captain yelled, “Hester has been hit! Get the radio!” My father was incensed. Later, as an older man, he could look back and see that, of course, the captain was right. We are, of course, no matter how much we’d like to think otherwise, all expendable. No matter how specialized or complicated, the job still needs to be done and whether it is us who does it or the next person, it will get done. Of all the lessons of life, that one might be the hardest to learn. It certainly took me much longer than it did my father before I truly understood that.
Those first few days in Europe must have been hell. Not that the rest of it wasn’t too, but at least with time, they got used to some of it. Whatever training any of those boys had gotten, they couldn’t possibly have been prepared for what was really happening there. It was a true sink-or-swim moment and, luckily, my father kept paddling. I would like to think that I would not have gone screaming off into the night like some of those poor men, but until we are actually faced with something like that, there is no way to know for sure. I truly hope that I never have to find out.
My father was one of the lucky ones who was able to come home physically whole and live a full and mostly happy life. So many didn’t. I look at what he went through, and it probably didn’t take very long being shot at in those fields before that experience started changing him. I don’t know that the saying, “war will make a man of you,” is something worth ascribing to. I would like to think that a person can fulfill all they are meant to be and do without having to go through that hellish crucible. Those that do are certainly forged into something else, often something very strong, but is it something better?
This is absolutely incredible!