The 87th Division was in Luxembourg for two weeks until the end of January 1945. That marked the official end of the Battle of the Bulge. For the next three months, before the Germans surrendered, Allied forces kept pushing them back towards Berlin. In February, Dad’s unit was sent north into Belgium again but this time to Manderfeld, which was near the Rhine River: the border. I’ll let my father describe his last months of the war.
“We were close to the Siegfried line, which the Germans had built early in the war. We could see heavy concrete pillboxes scattered behind multiple rows of “dragon’s teeth.” These were heavy concrete blocks embedded in the ground to stop tank attacks. The thought that we might have to accompany the infantry as it attacked this formidable barrier weighed heavily on us. One cold, overcast night we were near the line when the Germans shot several flares high in the sky, below the low clouds. They were attached to small parachutes and came down very slowly. They lit up a big area. We could see the dragon’s teeth in the snow. It was scary.
When the snow first started to melt, we were at a farmhouse from which we had to drive across a pasture. There were several dead cows and horses, partially covered by the snow. The captain mentioned that when the ground thawed a little more, we would have to bury these animals, which would begin to rot when they thawed. Thank goodness we moved on before having to do that.
The unpaved roads quickly became deeply rutted tracks in the mud. At one location, our route back to the battery took us off a blocked road and through a pasture, which became a quagmire. At a low spot, mud ruts were about a foot deep and spread out over a large area. I would drive the jeep as far as I could. Then some guy who was manning a parked one-and-a-half-ton truck would walk out in high boots and hook a metal cable to the jeep, go back and start the winch on the front of the truck and pull us to firmer ground.
We were in the area more than a month before the infantry pushed into the Siegfried fortifications. We moved with the 347th to direct artillery fire on the pill boxes. To our relief, they did not hold out long. By this time the Germans did not have sufficient first-rate troops to man them. When they surrendered, we found that they were Volkstrum units, formed late in the war. They consisted of young boys and old men. Instead of the standard German rifles, the ones we saw were armed with rifles they said had been captured from the Danish Army.
One pillbox had been stuck by one of our white phosphorus shells. It had gotten inside somehow. Among the Germans who came out and surrendered was one soldier whose face and hands had been burned completely black.
During my time in Belgium, we passed through the town of St. Vith several times. I don’t remember seeing a single undamaged house in the town… At one place on our route through the rubble, the leg of a German soldier, still in its boot, lay in the center of the road. We drove around it.
The US Army had graves registration units that collected the dead bodies of soldiers. The bodies often lay on the ground for days before they were collected. By the time they were picked up, their wounded areas had turned black. The units collected the bodies, often with missing limbs or consisting of only half a body, in one-and-and-a-half ton trucks. They would lie in the open, all jumbled up, with stiff limbs sticking out in every direction. The sight of them did nothing for our morale. The graves registration units took them back to collecting areas for identification.
We each wore two dog tags on a chain around our necks. If you were killed one was left with your body and the other was sent into the record-keeping system. The bodies were finally encased in mattress covers and buried in what would become permanent graveyards… After the war next of kin could decide to have the bodies exhumed and returned to the United States for reburial.
The Germans did not collect their dead but buried them near the places where they had fallen, in a corner of a field or a small patch beside a road. They made temporary wooden grave markers out of unpainted planks. They were joined to form a crucifix, but wedges were sawn from the arms so that they were in the shape of a Maltese cross. They painted the name and other details with black paint, using a thin brush. They also outlined the cross. For the Americans, they used a plain board and tacked a dog tag on it. Sometimes the Germans merely made a cross from sections of a small tree trunk or limb tied or wired together to form a cross. They would then hang the dead man’s helmet on it.”
Cancio, the guy who had replaced Dad as Wire Corporal, got sent home. “Cancio had his foot blown off by a land mine. He was tying the phone wire to a tree, back from the road. The tree protected the rest of his body but not his foot. He was lucky in that he did not suffer from shock after losing his foot. A captain in the 347th had both feet blown off. He felt no pain. When told that he had lost both feet he joked that “That is a sure cure for athlete’s foot.” However, he soon died of shock.
Walsh was in the wire section, which laid telephone wires the same way we did but behind our positions, so the work was safer than ours. Walsh was completely miscast as a soldier. At Fordham, he had majored in philosophy and French. He was an extremely devout Catholic and a professional Irishman. He couldn’t be bothered with conforming to the most elementary behavior the army required. He usually had a very sour expression on his face. I realize now that he must have suffered from extreme depression. I liked him and we got on well together despite the big background differences between a small-town, Southern Protestant and a devout Catholic New Yorker.
He could not stand most of the men in his section, especially the man he was often teamed with, whom I thought pleasant enough, but he was one of the least educated men in the battery. He told me that he would just as soon be dead as continue the miserable life he was leading. When I remonstrated with him, he said he knew that when he died, he would be able to see Christ.
One night when I was back with the battery in a village in Belgium or Germany the chow line passed next to a small stack of German teller (plate) mines. The engineers had dug them up from spots where they had been placed to blow up our tanks or trucks. They were dangerous but were marked off with white cloth tape strung on sticks surrounding them.
We all filed past the mines as we moved ahead in the chow line. We took our full mess kits and canteen cups back to the houses where we were billeted to eat. As we were eating, we heard a terrific explosion. It turned out that the mines had exploded, killing both Walsh and the man he disliked so much. Because of the rule that we had to keep a five-yard interval between men while waiting in line no one else was hurt. Only a part of Walsh’s upper torso was found on the roof of a neighboring house. Half of the other man’s body was blown away.
Danger was always present to some degree, however small, while you were within several miles of the front line. On one occasion the Germans even located one of our gun batteries and killed several men on a gun crew with a well-placed artillery shell. The danger increased dramatically as you moved up to the places where the riflemen were. We were often with the battalion commander, close enough to be exposed to enemy small arms and other fire but behind the riflemen.
Sometime after the snow had gone, Smith and I were walking on foot with Captain Giske, following the colonel. While we were close to the front-line riflemen, there wasn’t any firing going on in our immediate area. The captain sent Smith and me back to the rear for something. When we came back the men had advanced. We arrived at the edge of a big pasture and could see that they were engaged at the top of a slope on the other side of a little valley. We could hear rifle, machine gun, and occasionally mortar fire.
Separated by a few yards from each other, we were making our way on the soft pasture grass down our side of the valley, and we suddenly heard what we assumed to be a rifle bullet hit the grass between us. We both knelt, but there was no cover. We didn’t know whether a sniper was firing at us or whether it was merely a stray bullet from distant firing. We had no choice but to continue to walk down the hill.
As we came up the other side, we saw that most of the battalion, as well as Giske, were lying down behind a low stone wall. A German machine gun was on the other side of the wall firing directly over it. There was no room for us next to the wall, so Smith and I lay flat in some stubble, perhaps 30 feet away. The stubble field had several holes caused by explosions of mortar shells, which were still coming in. The holes were wide and shallow, about a foot deep in the center and about five feet or less in diameter, with clods of soil scattered around them. I decided that in addition to giving me some protection a hole would unlikely be hit again by another mortar shell. The hole was too small to protect my whole body. If I lay on my side with my hips in the deepest part of the hole my head was outside of the hole. If I lay with my head in the deepest part, the family jewels would be exposed. I switched positions several times.
One of the infantry sergeants picked up a rifle, stood up, and fired over the wall at the machine gun nest. The machine gun returned fire and knocked the gun from his hands. He picked it up again and killed both machine gunners.
Just by the wall an infantry medic was standing next to the body of an American second lieutenant, practically crying, saying what a good guy the lieutenant had been. The young officer only had a small thick smudge of red matter on the side of his head. “That is his brains oozing out,” the medic said.
The two dead Germans were lying on their backs next to the machine gun. No more Germans were in sight. As they often did both in large-scale and small-scale retreats, they had left a small force to hold us up while most of their troops retreated to better positions.
We nearly all had diarrhea to some degree. I suddenly had to go. There wasn’t any place to go, so I reluctantly decided to dig my hole where I was crouching. In deference to my fellow soldiers, I turned my backside towards the Germans. They immediately began to fire at us. I quickly went from my squatting position to lying prone and nobody was hit. I eventually managed to get my pants back up and we continued to move ahead. I guess the Germans could not pass up the promising target of my white behind as they retreated.
Nearly every town in Germany was built around a central square. It seems to me that every single one of them was called “Adolf Hitler Platz.” The square always contained a sizeable wooden bulletin board, painted black and with a sign at the top saying “Hier spricht der NSDAP,” that is, the NAZI party speaks here. It seemed to have all kinds of official notices about regulations, exhortations to do various things to help the war effort, etc. Many bare walls around the town had a stylized silhouette of a furtive character in a cape as a warning against spies.
One afternoon we were surprised to see a big US four-engine B-17 bomber silently gliding just over the treetops and heard it crash land in a field beyond the woods behind us. I didn’t see it until later. The plane was badly damaged but not destroyed. Everyone was saved. On another occasion, we could see puffs of black smoke from 88 mm German AA shells exploding among a formation of A-20 bombers coming back from a raid in Germany. The planes were very high, and we could not hear the explosions. Suddenly one of the shells hit a plane. It immediately went into a vertical dive. About halfway to the ground it came out of it and started to climb. We gave a big cheer, but a second later it went back into the dive, and we saw the explosion when it hit the ground.
Once across the Rhine, we advanced rapidly, often moving 20 miles a day. The infantry would advance in trucks until there was some opposition, get out, clear it up, and get back in the trucks. Sometimes our division was squeezed out of the front by divisions on each side and we didn’t advance at all for a day or two, then the infantry would again ride ahead. Once for a couple of days, our division followed up an armored division that had gone through and was about a day ahead. Our little section, in our two jeeps, moved in the convoy with the trucks carrying the infantry. The high point was when we came to a big fork in the Autobahn with a huge BERLIN sign in the center pointing north. We all broke into loud cheers when we saw it. It seemed incredible that we had advanced so far.
One night we were walking along in a double column on each side of a narrow, tarred road. Suddenly from just ahead of us around a curve in the road, we heard a lot of rifle fire, which soon stopped. As we moved around the curve two Germans were lying in the road. One was already dead and the other one was losing huge quantities of blood that was forming a big pool around him. The column had come around the corner and the two Germans, who had been hiding in the dark, fired on our men and killed some of them. They then held up their hands to surrender. Our soldiers let them have it. If the Germans had surrendered before getting in their last shots, they would have remained alive.”
I read these stories and I can remember my father telling us some of them, but it still seems unbelievable to me that this was something he experienced. Even in the tone of his writing, there’s something somewhat ordinary about all of it. How many dead bodies do you see before you stop being able to take them in? How many near-death experiences do you have before you stop reacting to them? There does seem to be a number because my father and the men around him seem to have reached it.
After the Bulge, the war in Europe went on for three more months. While it might have started to get easier, it never got easy. People got killed every day. If you relaxed your guard too much, you were a dead man.
Everything that I’ve quoted above, my father wrote when he was in his eighties. This is the letter that my father wrote home to my grandmother for Mother’s Day on April 22, 1945. The Germans surrendered two weeks later.
“Dear Eunice,
I wrote a letter yesterday, but I haven’t gotten around to having it censored and mailed yet. The Mother’s Day card is strictly G. I., but you will agree it is the spirit that matters. Last year this time I was home on furlough. I hope that by this time next year we can all be together again.
I know my being overseas is probably harder on you than it is on me. I have said before that as a whole I like it over here. That still goes and I like it better all of the time. It is quite a stirring experience at times to be at the scene of today’s headlines and tomorrow’s history. There are many scenes I have seen over here that I wish you could have enjoyed with me. I believe that the main reason I want to get home at all is to describe the things I have seen and done.
Of course, there are times when all there is to be seen is ugliness. I think that they are not the things that will stick longest in my memory.
My wish is that you won’t be worried about me.
With all my love,
Albert”
We all compartmentalize in some way to survive. My father was good at it. I am too. The stories he told to my sister and me never mentioned the bloodshed or the death. What he told us about were only the good things he had seen and done - the life-long friends he made, the different places he’d seen, and the funny things that happened to him along the way. He only started talking about everything else that happened toward the end of his life. I remember being amazed, just before he died, when, from his bed, he started telling Michael some of the ugly stories. I had never heard them before.
My father was above all a very kind man. He carried all of that with him and did not think that anyone else should have to. He only wrote all of this down after he retired when we asked him to.
Thanks, Pop. For all of it.
This is beyond powerful...painfully powerful!!
WOW! Amazing descriptions and reports, I can see where you get your writing skills. How wonderful that your father agreed to write all that down for you! Live history is what it is.
👍🏼🙏