Battalion from the Mojave

For the three days prior to July 25, 1944, there had been a lull on the soggy Normandy battlefield. July 25 was bright and clear, and before noon troops of the 535th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion heard the roar of an oncoming flight of bombers, the first wave of an aerial attack that was combined with a ground assault designed to smash out of the bridgehead.

Continuing for about two and one-half hours, the airplanes came in wave after wave, dropping fragmentation and high-explosive bombs in the St. Lo area ahead of the 535th and other First Army positions. Nearly 2,500 planes unloaded close to 66,000 bombs and "the drumming of the bombs never let up," according to an officer who observed the awesome sight.¹

Several of the planes were seen to go down in flames. D BATTERY JOURNAL reported:

The explosions and noise were terrific, and a tremendous amount of damage must have been inflicted on the enemy... During the bombing one could see occasional streaks of smoke going straight down to the ground and we believe this was caused by rockets. This bombing began to let up about 12 noon but explosions from both bombs and artillery continued on into the afternoon... Evidently the big push is on.

Early on the following morning the artillery near the 535th launched a heavy shelling, of two-hours' duration, and there were sporadic barrages later in the day. The ack-ack men heard on July 26 that United States' tanks had broken through, followed by infantry. Reports on ensuing days confirmed a big breakthrough. First Army tanks were reported "rooting out resistance like gigantic hump-backed hogs." The First Army was said to be on the march "on every road of a fluid 20-mile front." Tanks thundered through, ahead of the broken lines, with jeeps and giant carriers. By the end of the month the drive had outstripped communications as U.S. columns streamed into the Avranches area, tanks and armored infantry in the lead, then more infantry behind, all "rolling forward under clouds of dust." Some troops were dealing with pockets of Germans that had been left behind.²

On July 30 the batteries moved to set up weapons for defense of three separate landing grounds. A number of enemy planes were fired on. Two were seen to explode. As the battlefront moved further ahead, the Luftwaffe was concentrating on some of the advancing columns. The main effort was directed in the area between Avranches and Pontaubault, where the entire Third Army funneled through. (Third Army headquarters was brought up on Aug. 1 to take charge on the First Army's right flank.)³

July 31 was a warm sunny day and "the men were in the best of spirits," D Battery's JOURNAL writer reported. He also noted:

The war news was excellent, Russia making great strides toward Warsaw, Prussia and Riga, and our troops smashing through for great gains all along the line.

Slightly more than a week after the breakthrough, the 535th convoyed to Pont-Hebert-- still a little way from the old front line-- to protect a munitions dump.⁴ The troops dug into ground as tough and rocky as Tennessee. Some German graves were discovered,⁵ and GIs found the scattered remains of the battlefield-- grenades and dud shells, French picture magazines of 1939, U.S. propaganda leaflets in ration cans and boxes, silver strips of American "window"-- dropped by planes to foul up radar-- a German wallet in the Headquarters Battery area, containing pictures of soldiers and a bright-eyed girl with a country look, and a German corpse, near an old machine gun nest covered with brush. Headquarters men policed up the area.

French youngsters from Pont-Hebert across the hill dropped in for visits at the Battalion CP. They did not like "les Boches"-- the Germans-- who, they said, blew up the village. They made a sweeping motion with one arm and whistled to show how "les Boches" departed. To imitate the pursuing Americans, they hunched over, grimaced and clutched an imaginary steering wheel which jerked back and forth in their hands. Our goggled jeep drivers and speeding Negroes in the Quartermaster trucks probably had impressed them greatly. And naturally these youths said they wanted to get some cigarettes ("pour Papa") and candy.

In early August at the positions near Pont-Hebert, considerable activity was noticeable at night, as large convoys rumbled through, moving supplies to the front.⁶ It was a front that moved further away from us each day.

On Aug. 10 the Battalion moved further south, this time out of the old Normandy beachhead, and the sight of the devastation, as we passed in convoys, tempered the elation about the favorable progress of the war for the Allies. The countryside around St. Lo was desolate. Dead cows, with legs sticking straight out, were scattered in fields, and some of the bloated animals fitted tightly in roadside ditches. Roads had been patched by the Army, but the fields still were full of bomb and shell holes, and earth thrown out by the multitude of explosions gave the entire area a dirty appearance.

Wrecked German halftracks, tanks and trucks were strewn about; some Mark IV tanks had been flopped onto their backs by bombs, and the turret of one was wrenched off and hurled 10 feet away. The steeple of a church was tattered from shellfire, probably aimed at a sniper who had hidden there, and all of the farmhouses were battered and the civilians gone. Driving past the deserted houses and smelly cows and tremendous disarray and wreckage was sobering, especially after dark. Some of the 535th troops passing by saw a small dog wandering through a yard in the dusk.

"That little dog has come home and there's nothing to come home to," Lois Wilgus, a 535th GI, commented.

Houses on the outskirts of St. Lo were undamaged except for litter and broken windows, but the main part of the little city was smashed into heaps of rubble five to fifteen feet high, with jagged remains of stone walls rising above the piles. A member of the 535th could try to imagine how an American city would appear if a third world war could not be prevented, with its accompanying destruction on the North American continent. In his mind he could visualize empty houses on the fringes of his own home city, no youngsters playing, no shoppers, most of the city beaten into piles of wreckage, no bright shop windows, the plate glass shattered into countless pieces and buried, the only civilians in sight an old man and an old woman pushing a wheelbarrow with mattress and a few other personal belongings, as at St. Lo.

All day the convoys streamed through St. Lo, stirring dust that blinded and made the piles of rubble even whiter.

At night the town was eerie. The orange moon shone through the windows of broken walls, and blacked-out trucks moved through like ghosts.

Only noises were the hum of convoys and racket of a rivet gun where a road crew was working.⁷

D BATTERY JOURNAL states that the battery crews set up in the Torigni-sur-Vire area, defending an ammunition dump. A Battery moved to Pontfarcy area, and B to LaFermier to protect two bridges.⁸

"A good many S mines were located in fields adjoining that occupied by the Battery CP," D BATTERY JOURNAL states. "Several cows pastured in these fields stepped on them, losing legs, etc. Hard on the beef supply but cows do make good mine detectors."

Numerous Allied planes passed over during the night of Aug. 12, and the entire sky to the south flared with light as U.S. artillery hammered the German positions.⁹

About this time a message received by the 535th from Gen. Bernard Montgomery (it was dated Aug. 11) called for "renewed energy" and pointed out:

The whole of Cherbourg peninsula is in our hands, and most of Brittany also; our armies are moving relentlessly eastwards into France; many hundreds of towns and villages have been liberated. The prisoners taken are well over 100,000, and great quantities of enemy equipment and war material have been captured or destroyed. And best of all, the great bulk of the German forces in NW Europe are in a bad way; we are 'round behind them in many places, and it is possible that some of them will not get away. They will fight hard to avoid disaster; that we know. But let each one of us make a tremendous effort to "write off" this powerful German force; it has caused us no small trouble during the last two months; let us finish with it once and for all, and so hasten the end of the war.¹⁰

In the wake of the fast-moving Allied drive, the 535th made its longest convoy so far on the continent, to the Mayenne area on Aug. 17. Mayenne is approximately 60 miles, in a direct line, southeast of St. Lo.

For long distances past the breakthrough area, where the U.S. advance had been rapid, the countryside was pretty and the little villages with their big churches had been taken in good condition. There were civilians to stare and wave at the passing troops, and brightly-colored German posters on a village bulletin board, half of them torn now or scratched into illegibility. One showed a snail with a United States flag and a British flag attached, at the toe of Italy.

"It's a long way to Rome," the poster commented in English.

Other posters advertised for French volunteers to fight Russia, which was pictured as a bloody flood and a ravaging fire.

Large numbers of German vehicles, some smashed and burned and some abandoned, were scattered along roads leading south toward Mayenne and Brittany. Half a dozen burnt-black German helmets were strewn alongside one truck. Carts had caromed off the road, noses pointing into the ditch, and a passer-by could guess that the vehicles were veered there by fleeing Germans trying to escape strafing P47s.

But we knew that the battle, even then, was not as one-sided as some might believe. At St. Barthelmy, the 535th troops saw American guns and burned halftracks that had been overrun during a German counterattack, and by the side of the road was a black shriveled GI corpse, still clad in leggings and fatigues.

An attempt had been made at Mortain to drive the Americans into the sea, starting Aug. 7, and the enemy spearheads were halted 16 miles from Avranches, which is close to the coast. The Germans overran Mortain on the main road from Vire to Alencon but withdrew from there Aug. 11.¹¹

While 535th vehicles were stopped in the Mortain area near several German corpses, Capt. Stanley Lowe recalled, Ivan Schielke of the Medical Detachment jumped off the truck. Schielke had a German background, and had been talking before the 535th went overseas about his Uncle Louie in Germany -- "we were all anxious to meet Uncle Louie," the captain remembered.

Schielke was standing over one of the bodies at Mortain when other Medics heard him say in a scolding voice:

"Uncle Louie, what would Hitler think of you in a shape like this?"

When Schielke returned to the truck he said, "That's my Uncle Louie."

The Medics never heard of Uncle Louie again, the captain said.

Traveling through France at this time could be somewhat scarey, especially if traveling in a lone vehicle. We had become accustomed to the crowded condition of the beachhead, but in heading south toward Brittany or Mayenne travelers might not see other Americans for miles.

One of Captain Lowe's recollections of these times is that while a 535th convoy was "highballing" through France, the Medics managed to get several fresh eggs from the natives, by bartering.

"I still carry the mental picture of the boys on the back of the speeding 2 1/2-ton truck, trying to fry those eggs in a mess kit above a flame about the size of three matches," Lowe said. "I must admit they tasted good."

Battalion CP was established at Oisseau, a short distance north of Mayenne, before moving on to Mayenne.

Medics slept for the first time in France above the surface of the ground, in pup tents in a grove of tall trees. T/3 Norman Bergstrom and three other Medics from the Oisseau CP accompanied a convoy of 40 trucks for five days while gasoline and 105 mm ammunition were convoyed to a supply point near Paris.

"We cashed in on a royal welcome that was intended for the French armored division that was headed for Paris," Bergstrom stated. "Every time our trucks stopped in cities or villages we were showered with flowers, fruit, fresh eggs, or apple cider. The French were very enthusiastic with their welcome to their liberators."¹²

After the wreckage visible in Normandy, the B BATTERY JOURNAL writer was properly impressed with the community which his unit reached on Aug. 17 in convoy. He refers to "beautiful old Mayenne," where the battery provided ack-ack protection for bridges crossing the river inside the city. A Battery, defending the north half of Mayenne bridges and road net, moved to St. George Butavent. D Battery set up at Ambrieres.¹³

"A constant flow of supplies, equipment, men, tanks, etc., was seen to be moving up to the front all day and most of the night," the D BATTERY JOURNAL stated.

On Aug. 23 while still in the Mayenne area troops of the 535th heard via the radio that Paris was in the control of the Allies. This announcement touched off considerable excitement among the French in the area. Later in the day the troops learned that Rumania had changed its government and switched to the side of the Allies.¹⁴

The report on Paris was a bit premature, as fighting was under way in the French capital Aug. 25-26 and the last machine gun of the enemy was not reported stilled until Aug. 26.¹⁵

Everyone was elated by the progress of the campaign and felt that the end of the war was near. Earlier, a First Infantry Division man hauling supplies to his outfit-- he had stopped for a meal at the Battalion CP-- had told the 535th men that the general opinion "on the line" was that the war would be over around Sept. 1. His deadline did not seem likely but there was a considerable feeling of optimism.

Prisoners captured in the big breakout were being hauled back over the many miles of road to Normandy. Back in early June, they had only to march a few miles to the beach, under escort.

About this time, more so than before, we began to see that the war was being fought on two levels. One was by the hundreds of thousands of troops at the front-- many suffering mental hell, dying in fields and in towns and villages whose names they never had heard before-- and by auxiliary forces including the supply troops, bringing up food, ammunition, clothes, tanks, guns and other vital materials.

The other war was on paper, in the magazines and daily newspapers, and the hero of these battles was Gen. George Patton. Snapped by the photographer, perhaps coming out of the door of a tent, he was the star of the war. "Patton Smashes into Brittany," Patton does this and that, in the lead of his daring and outstanding Third Army. The headlines and stories said little of what combat was and what it meant. First Army was played down, and often referred to as just Americans or Yanks.

At VII Corps headquarters, where the author of BATTALION FROM THE MOJAVE went for information to mark up on the Battalion mapboard, men said that Patton's army, driving into Mayenne and Brittany areas, was meeting little resistance, and collecting "the liquor, women and praises." But there was not much publicity for the ferocious Mortain counterattack in the First Army sector.

In retrospect, it can be seen that the journalistic treatment of Patton was not novel, but was in the oldest traditions. Unable to get all the necessary facts in vast array or to hold the interest of the audience with scattergun reporting, storytellers of all eras have seized upon one or a very few individuals to personalize the issues, to bring the impact more closely home to the listener or reader; the story of the "hero" has been told innumerable times, and facts frequently blur out into mythology in the embellishments by over-zealous individuals.

So in the CP of the 535th and in the gun positions, by the 40mms and halftracks, the men of a battalion unknown to the world at large read of the printed daily exploits of one individual singled out from hundreds of thousands,

Gen. Courtney Hodges, commander of the 535th's army-— the First-- and Gen. Joseph Lawton Collins, commander of the VII Corps, remained largely only names, blurry and dim figures even to men who served under them, such as the more than eight hundred in the 535th Battalion.

The arguments over the First versus Third armies, and the Patton publicity, were to continue throughout all the time in Europe after the Normandy breakthrough, wherever veterans of these outfits mingled, in cafes of Le Havre, on curbs by the village rathaus, and elsewhere.

On Aug. 25 the Battalion convoyed from the Mayenne area into a bivouac near Alencon.

The 535th's CP was set up in an orchard near a village. Frenchmen came in shaking hands and wandered around looking at the troops and their equipment, like visitors to an Indian village in the western United States. They presented the GIs with various gifts including cider and eggs.

A Battery moved to an airstrip near Peray on Aug. 26, while B Battery was at Colombiers, near Alencon defending an airstrip under construction. D Battery, also on airstrip protection, was set up near St. Marceau. On the following day, Aug. 27, D's unit moved about 80 miles to a new location near La Loupe.¹⁶

During the numerous moves, the 535th troops received fine receptions. French people lined sidewalks of the towns and ‘“‘laughed and waved at us as we passed by them," the D BATTERY JOURNAL writer observed. "A great feeling of friendship seemed to exist."

On Aug. 30 the 535th moved up to the Paris area.

For the final part of the journey to Paris, a highway ran straight through a green plain, west of Versailles, and alongside this road the passing troops saw a mound made by dirt scooped over a dead German. A limb struck into the grave in the field was bent with the weight of a rain-soaked Wehrmacht jacket hung on it, lonely in that land that had been alien to the soldier now lying forever beneath its soil.

Long convoys of trucks and guns were heading up toward Versailles, and when some of the 535th vehicles reached the famous one-time capitol of France where the great gray palaces of the "Sun King" still stood as monuments to former glories, the streets were jammed as if for a parade. The French were crowded out into the street, leaving only a narrow lane for traffic, and they yelled and waved and reached up to try to shake, or joyfully slapped extended hands of the GIs.

And further on-- after grim scenes in the wrecked villages of Normandy and the dreary country towns of Mayenne-- there burst into the gaze of the astonished GIs of the 535th the magnificence of "the city of light," Paris-- broad boulevards, modern buildings, sidewalk cafes, swarms of pretty women in elegant dresses, riding bicycles. A journalist who was in Paris about the same time commented that food restrictions and the amount of bicycling needed to get around a big city without other means of transportation had endowed the girl bicyclists with "legs of a length and slimness and firmness and brownness never associated with French womanhood." Another writer commented on the girls too-- "the beauty chorus" riding to work in gay summer frocks, "their skirts billowing up just over their knees, giving the effect of a scene from a musical comedy."¹⁷ The woman appeared beautiful from a distance, although they did not show up so well on closer inspection.

For most of the troops, Paris seemed at first glance to live up to its full reputation as one of the world's greatest cities. GIs could not analyze the problems facing the French populace or anticipate the deterioration in French-American relations that would come later. A newsman who was in the city at about the same time as the 535th provided a more sober assessment. At the Cafe de la Paix, Harold Denny found the old animation "lacking," no sign of the "boulevadiers of other days," and the city as a whole without enough to eat, deprived of many of its "simplest amenities" and facing some hard realities.¹⁸ But for troops of the 535th to be in Paris, to be alive and basking in the still-warm welcome of the residents of a magnificent city was sufficient.

Headquarters convoy pulled into a woods near a traffic circle on the outskirts of Paris on the first night, while American convoys moved steadily through on the road to Paris. A woman brought her daughter, about 10, up to a GI to kiss. "First American," she said. Another woman, who spoke fair English, said the people had thought the Americans had all been killed on the beaches and had just about given up hope. A baker said, "When the Americans came, I was so happy I cried." To the comment that "It's not a very good day" (because of the weather), the baker said, "It's a beautiful day-- our friends are here."

Youngsters were pestering the GIs for bonbons, chewing gum and "see-gah-ret pour pawpaw." They always said the cigarettes were for papa, although even the smallest youngsters smoked. A soldier could cause a sensation by pulling out a pack of cigarettes at a busy corner.

One 535th battery was stationed at the airfield at Villacoublay, another (A) at the airfield at Orly, and the other two on smaller airstrips in between. The four were in a fairly straight line across the south side of Paris, Col. William H. Francis, the 535th's commanding officer, recalled.

A Battery set up at Orly on Aug. 30, while on the same day D Battery moved to Toussus-le-Noble south of Versailles, and B Battery took positions at Verte la Grand at an airfield used by the Ninth Air Force. The Ninth Air Force from Normandy had moved to clusters of airfields in the LeMans-Chartres area, then to the Paris area, mainly in September.¹⁹

On the day the 535th moved into the Paris area some of the city's suburbs still were being cleared of enemy, although the last reported action in the city was on Aug. 26.²⁰

"I put the Battalion CP in Antony because it was more or less in the center of the batteries, the road net favored it, a schoolhouse was available for our use as offices and billets, and it would enable us to say our CP was in Paris," Colonel Francis said.

Headquarters men slept in beds on fat straw mattresses in the school at Antony, compensation enough, it seemed, for having slept for two and one half months on the ground. GIs knew it could not last but it was wonderful for a while.

Some of the troops got passes into the suburb of Antony, where an accordionist at a sidewalk cafe was playing "Le Marseillaise" and "It's a Long Long Way to Tipperary" over and over, and everyone was having a great time. Tough-appearing fellows with FFI armbands were much in evidence and drove the only autos on the streets. One of these characters, a little intoxicated, wanted some of the 535th men to help him drink his bottle of wine. He would shake their hands and say, in French:

We are comrades. We fight the Boche.

But in Antony one night shortly after the 535th's arrival, a group of 535th officers learned that the welcome they were receiving in the Paris area was not entirely altruistic.

They were sitting inside a cafe drinking champagne at 300 francs a bottle when a newcomer arrived, and they asked him to join them. The waiter brought a clean glass and another bottle, as the other bottles were empty. The new arrival asked for a label on the bottle, and the waiter was sent back to get such a bottle. On returning he said all the labels had been washed off in the ice water. In a brief argument, English on one side and French on the other, the newcomer asserted that the garcon was serving cidre mousseux. The waiter's face fell, then he said in English, "Okay, you win."

"All of those officers who had been appearing tight because they thought they were drinking champagne were suddenly sober," one recalled. "But no one asked for a refund."

During the 535th's short stay in the Paris area, some passes were distributed and many of the soldiers saw a number of the famed sights of Paris including the gray, hulking Notre Dame cathedral, flower stalls on the Seine bridge, the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel tower and other attractions. Some also attended the first USO show to be presented in liberated Paris, at the University of Paris, on Sept. 3.

On Sept. 7 the 535th or most of the Battalion started its convoy to Hirson, six miles from the Belgian border, and arrived there late in the evening. Battery A had been sending men on pass, one-third at a time, and the march order came before the last third had returned, Capt. Robert Bricker recalled. He had "men strung out all over France."

After our look at Paris, the rest of France appeared bleak, and Hirson was no exception.

D Battery CP set up in a cafe across the street from a cross topped by a German helmet, marking the common grave of four enemy soldiers, near the burned car in which they had been riding. Here the 535th men heard the rumble of supply traffic moving up 24 hours a day to the front; headlight beams cut through the darkness but the Luftwaffe was not in sight to see the blackout violation.²¹ Supply dumps were being protected by the 535th in this area.

Battery B was at Clare Fontaine protecting dumps, but on Sept. 15 moved southeast of Hirson to protect a field artillery battalion at rest period.²²

The Battalion's last CP in France in 1944, at Hirson, was in an abandoned factory building, a dank, drafty, concrete-floored structure which had been occupied by Germans. There were several rooms with barred windows high up on the walls, and a room full of upright posts, with a chain dangling from each. In this cold, melancholy place a GI could imagine all sorts of gruesome situations such as Gestapo men tying people to posts and beating them, or people wasting away in dungeons. But the building kept out the rain and wind, and we had seen numerous places and situations worse than Hirson.

Pvt. Donald Allen, author of a small book titled "War," named one of his poems for Hirson CP, where a blanket of mist enveloped the place with "cold grey fols," and rain drops fell lightly on dark green canvas. He wrote:

The First Army was well into Belgium now, and further east Hitler's Reich still was being battered by high-flying bombers.

Weather conditions in early September were not favorable for the big aircraft, but on Sept. 8 a spell of good weather moved in, and on each of the following six days the Eighth Air Force dispatched 1,000 or more bombers against Germany.²³ A large share of these were visible to men in the 535th gun positions. Pfc. Robert Koerber recorded what he saw:

Sept. 10-- Sky all clear. All types of friendly bombers went over from morning 'til night.

Sept. 11-- B17s, B26s, B24s went over all day, as far as the eye could see.

Sept. 12-- Bombers flew all night and are still flying.

Sept. 13-- Bombers have not stopped flying over since Sept. 10th.

Sept. 14-- The sun is blacked out by our bombers going over.

Koerber also made mention of one of the periodic supply missions in which the 535th was involved during the combat period. On Sept. 18 Ben Lester of D Battery left on truck detail, and the following day James Bagby was gone on a similar job. Both returned Sept. 20 after hauling gas for Patton's tanks.²⁴

For men of the 535th the Belgian city of Liege, a community of around 160,000 population, capital of the province of Liege and of the Walloons and center of a major industrial section, was "a little Paris," the second most beautiful city we had seen in Europe. The city had suffered considerable damage in some neighborhoods. But the downtown area still was intact, stores with attractive displays were open for business, and the tree-lined boulevards, parks, pleasant scenes along the Meuse River and especially the friendliness of the populace combined to make the Battalion's two-month stay memorable.

This was "a pleasant calm before the storm," T/3 Norman Bergstrom recalled.¹

The 535th left Hirson, France, on Sept. 22, convoyed through Rocroi and then into Belgium. As soon as the convoy crossed the border into Belgium, the soldiers noticed that the roads and houses were better. BATTERY A JOURNAL noted that the battery moved to Modave near Huy on Sept. 22, before going to Liege the following day, but most of the 535th headed directly to Liege on Sept. 22. At this important crossroads, only 21 miles from the German border, the Battalion's 40mm guns and halftracks were set up for defense of the remaining civilian bridges over the Meuse (one was a railway bridge which Colonel Francis termed 'very important"), as well as the Army's pontoon bridges over the same stream. Liege had been taken about two weeks previously, and the Third Armored Division which had entered the city to an enthusiastic welcome had found some of the Meuse bridges destroyed as the result of enemy action.²

At the same time that the 535th entered Liege, the Allied push which had been going so well for two months seemed to be losing some momentum, Germans in the Siegfried line, ordered to hold at all costs, were putting up a stiff fight in the First Army sector, and the British were attempting unsuccessfully to reach stranded airborne troops at Arnhem, in a battle which gave the German morale a big boost,³ But both of these actions seemed a bit remote from Liege in late September.

For two days, 535th Headquarters was camped in a park on one of the main boulevards waiting for the unit we relieved to move out of a nearby building. The kitchen area was taped off, and crowds of civilians lined the tape for breakfast, dinner and supper; expressions of the spectators were rapt as the cooks slapped food into our messkits. Several old ladies waited patiently for scraps from the garbage can. The author of BATTALION FROM THE MOJAVE had started to dump out a little coffee after breakfast when an old man shoved a tin cup under the GI cup and caught it. He drank the residue java and smacked his lips.

S/Sgt. Ola Parsley of the Medical Detachment went back one night for seconds. Afterwards, he said, "I thought those people would eat me up, they looked so mad at me going back for more." The people of Liege, we heard, had been eating sparsely, got little meat, no coffee or white bread.

In peacetime the Belgians had consumed an average of 2,700 calories, but official distribution under the German occupation provided for only 1,200 to 1,300 calories, and sometimes the potato ration was not distributed so food value was reduced still further.⁴

On our first night in Liege, as Headquarters men and Medics were lying in pup tents in the park, we heard an explosion, rumbling like thunder, on the edge of the city. A few women screamed and we could hear people running on the streets. The 535th men began thinking of holes, which we had not dug for a couple of months. We did not know at the time that the blast had been caused by a plummeting V-2, Hitler's second secret weapon.

The first V-2 had been fired at England on Sept. 8, and on the same day V-2s were used against Paris. The rocket, traveling more than five times the speed of sound, resembled "a flying telegraph pole" during the day time, and also according to witnesses was like the tail of a comet or a falling star at night. The explosion reportedly could be heard for 20 miles. V-2 workers had been informed in a booklet that the new weapon flew higher than any known projectile and had a detonation effect unequalled by any bomb or missile. However, an official historian has stated that the V-1 blast damage was heavier than the V-2s, although the warheads were similar in weight.⁵

The 535th personnel disliked the V-2s more than the V-1 buzzbombs, as they gave no warning before exploding on a target.

Headquarters moved into a building that had been used to recruit workers for Germany. Colored photographs of "Deutschland" still hung on the walls. On the broad balcony just outside the S-3 office, a GI could stand where the Nazis had stood and watch the city life, and the park below in the middle of the broad street, where fallen leaves went swirling along the grass and sidewalk when the autumn wind was blowing. On one of those fall days, the author of BATTALION FROM THE MOJAVE saw a black hearse drawn by horses, with the mourners tagging behind, a glacier-- ice cream vendor-- pushing his yellow wagon, an organ grinder playing sad songs such as "Santa Lucia" and looking up at the windows for donations, gray American convoys of gas, ammunition and rations heading for the front, all kinds of civilians riding bikes or walking, and a convoy of loaded ambulances coming back from the front. A reflection that came to mind was, there are guys who are all right today who will be in those ambulances coming back tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that, and when would it end?

Down the boulevard a short distance was the modernistic building housing the public baths. The showers, with women attendants in white uniforms, consisted of tiled stalls divided into two compartments, one for dressing and the other for shower. The water was hot and fine, and felt wonderful slamming into the skins of the GIs, who sang "Begin the Beguine" and other songs in the showers; on our first trip to the public baths many of us washed away dirt we felt must have been there since the earliest days of the Invasion. Afterwards, the fellows would sit in the balcony looking down on the swimming pool watching girls in brief bathing suits and drinking beer and eating ice cream. The garcon would hold off on the GIs' change, hoping they would forget the money. At night the enlisted men and the Belgian girls danced in the cafe by the pool. The girls learned quickly how to jitterbug.

American movies with French wording were advertised in big posters in front of Liege theaters; Deanna Durbin and Donald Duck were featured on one bill. Most of the cafes were sedate resorts but several were American-style "clip joints," with names such as the Louisiana and Shanghai, where phonographs blared swing music and B-girls watched for unwary suckers to ply with wine and champagne.

Walking along that pleasant old boulevard in the blackout, a GI might wish to know who lived in each house, what took place behind those dark building fronts. Vehicles were allowed to travel along with headlights on, for the battlefront was in the Aachen area now. On a night when a long convoy trundled through, lighting up the street so that it was unrecognizable to blackoutaccustomed eyes, a soldier could walk well past his destination without knowing the difference.

"Before passes were issued to the men," said T/3 Bergstrom of the Medics, "a popular sport was dodging MPs. Many of the men made friends with Belgian families, so dinner invitations were frequent. French fries and steaks were a treat and a great change from Army-type rations."⁶

D Battery's JOURNAL writer commented that the unit had its best quarters since the landing in Normandy. Most of the enlisted men had comfortable beds in nice homes or apartments.

But part of the time A Battery men slept in pup tents, Captain Bricker said. This was when the unit moved to the west edge of Liege to defend a landing strip. Bricker got trench foot there, and remembers it as a place of mud, water, cold and drizzle.

The Army had taken over a theater in Liege for daily movies for the soldiers, a theater with subdued lighting and soft curved-back seats similar to leading theaters in the United States. Slouching down in a seat with knees up on the back of the seat up front, watching the action on the screen, could be quite home-like. A banner was hung on each side of the screen, one with the colors of France and the U.S., and the other with the colors of Belgium.

One of the British Paramount newsreels shown in early October was as old as the fall of Cherbourg in Normandy, but the war shots still were interesting. One showed the American infantry walking at a fast pace down the main street of a wrecked village. Either the soldiers had "pepped up" for the cameraman, or Paramount News had speeded up the film because the usual slow gait of the foot soldiers was not in step with the spirit of the newsreel, which was of dead and surrendering Germans and simple, quick victories for the Allied side. Little of the real feel of war was presented.

On Oct. 12 a USO show was presented at an auditorium near the park, offering Belgian and American acts. Some Belgian girls came on the stage for a ballet, and when the GIs glimpsed them, in fluffed-out skirts and white stockings, they started whistling but then restrained themselves. The eight girls danced about on their toes and twirled over the stage in unison in a pleasing manner, and they got a big hand, with the master of ceremonies, a civilian from Brooklyn, leading the cheers. What a sight-- dainty Belgian ballet dancers on the stage and a big, bellowing comedian with false shoulders leaping about the footlights smashing an arm through the air and motioning wildly for more and more applause.

The Luftwaffe appeared only infrequently in the skies over Liege. Battery D, which had knocked down a ME 109 on Sept. 25, was credited with destruction of three more ME 109s, which roared in toward the bridges on Oct. 4. There were several other firings, as well as claims for hits during the autumn.⁷

On Nov. 11, the Armistice Day of World War I, a newsreel in a Liege theater, viewed by some of the 535th men in the evening, showed the taking of Antwerp, fighting in Aachen and the bombing of Germany. When the Belgians in the audience saw the Aachen refugees walking through their battered streets, one or two would give out with a pleased "Ha!" When a Lancaster bomber let go a swarm of incendiaries from the sky and then still another big cluster of them, the Belgians clapped loudly. It seemed strange in a way that people could have that attitude toward persons of a country or a city a short car drive away; yet the closeness apparently was a big factor. The Belgians suffered considerably in two German invasions, and they certainly did not like the German occupation. Down the boulevard from the theater was Gestapo headquarters and down the boulevard the other way the Germans, just before evacuating, had loaded tanks with dynamite and sent them rolling down a hill into the streets, we had been informed.⁸

The newsreel of Nov. 11 showed thousands and thousands of fires set by incendiaries burning below in the darkness, a fantastic sight. For the moment at least, war could seem as remote as if viewed from a theater in Riverside, Calif., or Wilmington, N.C.

A big crowd was promenading on the streets of Liege on Nov. 11. The city was full of jewelry and souvenir stores, and the soldiers strolled from one to another looking at silverware, scarfs, pins, bracelets and other keepsakes and mementos, all high-priced. Beer parlors and ice cream stores were doing a brisk business. Thousands of armed forces personnel were downtown-- French wearing blue tams, SOS troops, infantrymen on pass, MPs, Belgians, nurses, pilots and other Air Corps personnel, various Army troops. At night a stroller could make out the shapes of other pedestrians; numerous GIs were walking with their girls, Flashlights and other small hand-held lights were moving and searching out the walkways, all over the downtown area, Flashlights swung back and forth with the motion of arms. Often U.S. jeeps and trucks rolled along the boulevard-- a main supply route-- with headlights blazing. The lights revealed the fronts of closed stores, and they would silhouette a group of people running across the street to get out of the way. Guns of the 90mm battalion at Liege began cracking, and flashes appeared in the sky some miles away. A spray of red tracer bullets flew through the air; then all was quiet again on the war front. The night of Nov. 11 was one of the few evenings the 535th guns opened up briefly-- Battery A fired at unknown targets twice after 7 p.m., the last firing before we moved out of Liege.⁹

One night in Liege a report was received that light signals were being flashed from a tower on a hall in one of the city parks, and that the same thing had happened before. A squad was organized to investigate and Colonel Francis and Major Thomas Janney went along.

The colonel said:

We surrounded the tower, made a stealthy approach, and found the place absolutely empty. There wasn't a sign anyone had been there in months. But we did find that one of the windows at the top still had glass in it and was swinging on its hinges. As it swung out it caught and reflected the light of the moon, giving the appearance of someone inside using a flashlight.

The occasional perils of blackout driving about this time were recalled by Clarence Bonk, the parts man in the motor pool. Bonk had been out with Sgt. Fritz Eims, also of Headquarters Battery, looking for parts. This could be a big job, as the parts supply bases would move, and sometimes a lot of searching was required to find the new location. Bonk started across one of the Meuse bridges in a fog at Liege, but stopped near the middle, stepped out and started pacing along the span. He had gone only about 20-30 feet when he came to the end-- "no more bridge." This was the wrong bridge, one of the wrecked ones. When Bonk returned to the vehicle, Eims inquired, "Why did you stop?" "It must have been my guardian angel," Bonk commented.¹⁰

Liege had been shelled sporadically by German V-1s, the gyro-controlled missiles which were launched under their own power, supported by a catapult. B BATTERY JOURNAL observed a "large number of V-1s dropping around the city," under date of Sept. 26. The Belgians were suffering damage and casualties. The V-1s were "landing closer" by Oct. 11-one smashed to earth 300 yards from a B gun section. Battery journals of the 535th show an apparent step-up in V-1 activity on Oct. 22, and these robots were overhead almost daily thereafter. Pfc. Robert Koerber of D Battery said "'they look like a sneaky little rat with fire shooting out their tail."

In the last week the 535th was stationed in the city, the shelling was heavy. Liege residents moved into basements and sandbagged windows. A chimney pipe sometimes could be seen sticking out from among the bags. The old man and woman who did Headquarters laundry had been listening to the German propaganda on a radio and said the civilians would not be pounded by the V-1s and V-2s if the Americans were not in the city. At night from Headquarters CP, a new-arriving buzzbomb could be heard zooming overhead. We watched out the windows as the explosive smashed on the hill and a great light flared in the sky and then died out. Moments later the blast would reach us, rattling the windows, which we left ajar. In bed we would worry about the noises. A truck in the distance sounded like a buzzbomb coming in.

One of the buzzbombs cut off overhead one day and almost everybody in the Battalion CP dropped to the floors. There was the usual short silence, then the explosion. We went outside and found everyone looking at a column of black smoke rising about two blocks down the street. The bomb had fallen on a nursery. People were carrying out babies and digging for the rest. A man on top pulled off a board and threw it down. This raised dust, and dirt would trickle down the pile.¹¹

Pvt. Donald Allen wrote of this period:

They keep coming, hour after hour. Every 10 or 15 minutes they come, their ominous throb beating chill into your heart. The thing sputters, continues for a short while... another final cough of life, then a silence. One waits, heart pounding, for the inevitable burst, somewhere near, perhaps somewhere far...

I have seen people cringing in the cold, dank, unheated cellars... as small particles of plaster fell from the ceiling and walls, onto our shoulders and heads, as another of the things fell, beating its way into the earth, destroying innocent life and possessions... have heard small children whimper as the building reverberated with another explosion.

I have stood on the roof of a high apartment building at 37 ave du Luxembourg on a cold starlight night, to watch as the flaming thing came roaring into the city, watched as the sputtering flame grew larger, the throbbing motor louder, watched as it passed over my head, saw the brilliant flames, orange and fiery, of the detonation that lit up the dark skies as in day...

And still they keep coming, hour after hour,¹²

Figures on the number of V-1s fired into Liege vary. One source says that 1,592 were fired from Nov. 20, 1944, to Jan. 20, 1945, and that the maximum on one day was 64 on Dec. 23. Another source quotes Allied sources as saying that 3,141 V-1s were used against Liege.¹³

German communiques of this period told of the new ''victory" weapons landing in the "Greater'' Liege and Antwerp areas. A typical communique, Nov. 24 from Berlin, stated that ''the Greater London area and the industrial districts of Liege were under stronger long-range fire by day and night."¹⁴ This was the day after the 535th departed from Liege, and the longdistance shelling continued for some time afterward.

On Nov. 23, 1944, a miserable cold rainy day, the 535th, or most of the 535th,¹⁵ convoyed from friendly Liege to the border country of Belgium to become part of the First Army's “Liege Diver Belt," a sector defending against the winged V-1s. A number of battalions already had been gathered in a complex known as "Antwerp X'' to shoot at V-1s headed toward that Belgian metropolis, and their success had spurred establishment of the new buzzbomb defense.¹⁶ The First Army had given three gun battalions (90mm guns) and three automatic weapons battalions the mission of firing at the V-1s traveling toward Liege.¹⁷

In the muddy, unfriendly, German-speaking village of Bullingen where the Battalion CP was to be established, battery convoys rolled in during the afternoon. The men, wrapped in raincoats and overcoats, were a gloomy-appearing lot; some were huddled in blankets by their machine guns. Headquarters Section truck in Headquarters Battery was loaded with stools, mattresses and similar trappings, giving the aspect of a real rear-echelon outfit. Within a month all that excess paraphernalia, and even more, was gone.

Headquarters set up in Bullingen, while the line batteries moved further out, and lined up in the mud for defense against the buzzbombs, which were zooming across the leaden skies of the Bullingen area.

Outside of the V-1s and sporadic artillery, this part of the front was quiet. Not far north, other First Army troops were encountering rugged going. The day after we had moved up it was reported, troops in the Huertgen forest "were able to make only small gains through dripping forests and over ground churned now to knee-deep mud," and this was only by the toughest kind of fighting in a cold downpour.¹⁸

The stiffened resistance by the German troops probably aided the morale of Bullingen residents, a dour oe oh eae. spoke German and would hardly look at the GIs. We had seen several males with Hitler moustaches. Many Bullingen people had left because they were afraid of the Americans, and Headquarters personnel were living in the vacated houses.

These people were uncertain whether they would be German or Belgian in the future. Residents of the canton of Eupen, Malmedy and St. Vith were the Sudetens of Belgium, part of the Volksdeutsch around the fringes of Germany, people who were German in blood and often in spirit. The three cantons were given to Belgium after World War I, but had active pro-German political movements in 1939, and were reincorporated in the Reich in 1940.¹⁹

The mission of the 535th in the "Liege Diver Belt" was to shoot down as many of the weapons as possible before they could reach Liege. On Nov. 25 the batteries fired on 31 V-1s and managed to down three of these. They also blasted at two JU-88s and a ME-110, from the scattered gun sites in a countryside that a journal writer termed "a sea of mud." Snow fell on the night of Nov. 25-26, and when gunners and other personnel crawled out of pup tents in the morning the ground was white. On Nov. rockets flashed into the skies above the 535th's area, 36 were fired on, and five of these were knocked out of the murky ozone. Forty-two robot bombs were sighted on Nov. 27, and 39 were fired on; four of these were shot down.²⁰

One of the buzzbombs was hit by Gun Section 6 of C Battery, commanded by Sgt. Robert E. Lutz, and the warhead smashed down in Rocherath, 75 yards from the Battery's CP, wrecking part of a building. Lt. William E. Hughes, who had taken command of C Battery on Nov. 2 when Captain Robert McWaters was transferred to Group Headquarters, was hit by flying debris, thus becoming eligible for a purple heart.²¹

Of seven V-1s passing over on Nov. 28, six were engaged and one of these was destroyed. The weather was so poor on Nov. 29 that the 535th was able to engage only 14 of the 52 robot bombs passing over; three of these, shellblasted, caromed out of the dark skies.²²

Many of the V-1s rocketed over above the clouds, unseen by the gunners, and the Battalion had no radar to help guide the way for the shells. The crews at the 40mms and the machine gun men waited and watched for the low-flying buzzbombs, and opened up in the snow, rain and hail that fell from Thanksgiving through Nov. 29. Some of the V-1s were destroyed in the air, some dropped and exploded on the ground, others were jarred off their courses when their directional control elements were knocked out. Army outfits to the rear, especially at an ammunition dump, were alarmed. The ammo men were afraid a disabled V-1 might drop in their vicinity and touch off the entire dump.

Maj. Gen. Walter Lauer, commander of the 99th Infantry Division which had just moved into the same area, recalled that one ack-ack-blasted buzzbomb nearly wiped out his MP platoon, and said that another V-1 landed in the "backyard" of his CP at Butgenbach. As several AA battalions were operating by that time in the Diver Belt, it would be difficult to determine which outfit scored these hits. Certainly, the likelihood of damage and casualties was minimized, when a V-1 was knocked down in the open country, in comparison with what might happen if the buzzbomb reached its destined target in a populated area.

Near the end of November the targets were getting scarcer. On Nov. 30 only 16 V-1s passed over; 12 were fired on and three of these were destroyed. The batteries fired on nine buzzbombs on Dec. 1 and claimed four damaged, fired on four V-1s on Dec. 2, one on Dec. 3 and three on Dec. 4. Weather continued poor during this time.²³

Meantime one complete section was being pulled out of each battery at a time and sent back to Verviers for overhaul of weapons in the ordnance shops there. Captain Richard Meroney was in charge of this project.

At Headquarters, all hostile and friendly fights were plotted on a table beneath a green-shaded light that hung from the ceiling. Curls of cigarette smoke twisted and turned in the white light beneath the shade. Some of the men when not working leaned back in chairs against the wall, and we had bull sessions about the British empire, women, differences between England and Belgium, the racial problem, who started the war and whether the 535th would be sent to the Pacific theater of war. However, most of the talk did not go too deep. There was nothing about communism or nationalism and some other subjects; too dull for most of the fellows.

The reading material was a bit limited at times. One of the GIs sitting by the stove was absorbed one night in CONTACT COMICS. A pilot featured in this publication was "the Golden Eagle" who "strikes terror" into "the cowardly hearts" of the Japanese, when his guns "go rat-a-tat-tat." The magazine also showed crushing victories of the Lafayette Escardrille ("a sight that strikes terror in the Hun's heart"). And to round out the offering, there was "Black Venus, terror of the Burma skies"-- a kind of girl Superman-- and "the One Man Air Force."

Weather remained definitely mixed, and little of it good. Sleet slanted down in bruising style Dec. 5, knocking down a kitchen tent at D Battery. Snow fell most of the night of

Dec. 5-6 and during Dec. 8. Snow was falling again on Dec. 9, adding to the two feet already on the ground, Dec. 11 was the coldest day we had known so far in Europe. Sharp winds moaned across the foot of snow blanketing the Western front in the 535th's sector, and the falling snow blown into the soldiers' faces was like an ice spray. This day Pfc. Koerber wrote:

Tried to move the halftrack nearer to the road. One track rolled off. We had to dig the power plant out of a snowdrift. God, it's cold.

Next day the weather warmed up, and the main street of Bullingen was a slushy mess. We could hear a drove of bombers going to Germany as usual, high overhead. Despite cold, rain, snow or fog, we still could hear them in the sky every day. Our men were getting some additional protection from the cold, through the issuance of high-necked, thick, brown sweaters. But our main piece of winter clothing was a brown overcoat reaching below our knees.²⁴

S/Sgt. Raymond Dixon of C Battery recalled an incident of this time which he titled "the battle of the beans in Bullingen." He wrote:

It was a cold and snowy night in Bullingen, and a group of us were gathered in the kitchen of the house we were using as a second platoon quarters. Vincent Shapro, Dixon, James Fantaski, Frank Provhe and a few others were there. The old cook stove was roaring and all hands were hungry as usual. Someone stuck some cans of C Ration beans in the oven to heat. The bull session became quite interesting and the beans were forgotten. Suddenly we heard a couple of rapid-fire explosions, and almost simultaneously everyone was prone on the floor. Nothing else happened. Someone opened the oven door, and there all over the stove were the exploded beans. The roar of laughter which followed was wholehearted and salutary.

Just before mid-December the 535th received a new assignment-- antiaircraft defense of the 99th Infantry Division, anew outfit on the front line. The 99th (Checkerboard) Division had landed at LeHavre between Nov. 3 and 7, and had been assigned a long section in the partly-wooded countryside in our area,²⁵ Colonel Francis said the 535th was attached to the 99th because the 99th's positions were so close that little movement was necessary for the new assignment.

A Battery's second platoon and Battery headquarters moved to Rocherath on Dec. 11, and the next day the first platoon rolled out from Honsfeld, to Krinkelt. D Battery, moving from Murringen to Krinkelt on Dec. 12, encountered much difficulty moving guns and equipment in the snow. B Battery first platoon headed for Murringen on Dec. 12 to protect the 371st Field Artillery Battalion, and the second platoon moved to Butgenbach for AA protection of Division headquarters. C Battery, which had been relieved of its V-1 assignment Dec. 9, sent its first platoon to the 955th Field Artillery Battalion in Germany Dec. 10. Headquarters and second platoon of C Battery stayed in Rocherath, and second platoon was assigned to the 776th Field Artillery Battalion on Dec. 12.²⁶

Men of the 535th already had been talking about the thin dispersal of front-line troops in this area, and the situation became of more concern following our new assignment, in support of the division.

A short time earlier there had been considerable publicity about the First Army front further north, and a "Big Push" aimed at finishing off the war by quick exploitation of a break, through the Siegfried Line.²⁷ By early December at least three U.S. divisions were reported to have been badly mauled in what one officer called the "hardest and most costly fighting I have ever seen." Arrival of heavily-loaded hospital trains from the front was reported in Paris. There was talk about the "remarkable resurgence of military power" by the Germans.²⁸

Now some of the action was shifting to the front near the 535th. The Second Infantry Division, which had been south of the 99th in the Ardennes, had been moving out of its positions as it was relieved by the new 106th Division, starting on Dec. 10, and had moved into assembly areas in the Camp Elsenborn vicinity on Dec. 10, 11 and 12. The Second began moving up to the line on Dec. 12 in preparation for an attack.²⁹ Trucks carrying the Division moved up through Bullingen in snowy weather, while invisible (to us) bomber fleets roared toward Germany. Whiskered infantrymen were leaning back in the hard seats of most of the gray trucks in the convoys, uninterested in the December scenery. One red-haired youth, clean-shaven, was sitting up and looking around, taking in all the sights as the trucks rolled through the village. If he lived long enough, he was soon to be a real combat veteran. Some trucks hauled boxes of ammunition and rations. Nearer the front, in the Krinkelt area, the Second Division men unloaded and tramped to new positions.

On Dec. 13 the Second and 99th kicked off an attack, with the 9th Infantry of the Second Division plunging through the Checkerboard line in a narrow two-mile corridor, trying to break through the Siegfried line to the Roer dams which were a threat to the allied advance in the Roer Valley, and had to be taken before the main offensive started.³⁰ The Second encountered minefields, wire and concrete pillboxes, and heavy small arms, mortar and artillery fire. Infantrymen of the 99th, bucking deep snow, swung northeast to hit objectives in the outer belt of the Siegfried line. Opposition was considerable and progress was limited on the following days. Enemy patrols were active on Dec. 15 and were accompanied by dogs.³¹

In C Battery area of the 535th on Dec. 15 the Germans began to drop in some shells. The V-1s started again too but the battery couldn't shoot at them.

"Comment was made about the number of dud shells," Captain Hughes recalled. "The boys decided Jerry was out of gun powder and was using sawdust in shells."

Among the troops in general, the feeling of resentment against the Germans was continuing to increase. We felt they were postponing defeat for a few months at the cost of many more months of defeat and suffering. They inhumanly continued to fight a lost war, and were seeking our deaths.

The hellish confusion and clamor that erupted along the First Army front in late December 1944 and that soon received the name of the Battle of the Bulge was a shocker to the 535th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion and to other American units on the front in the Ardennes.

To maintain surprise, the Germans attacked initially with small forces to give the impression of a reconnaissance in force. They were successful in this, and on the first day, according to an official historian, none of the Allied commanders from General Eisenhower on down realized the real extent of the German attack. Considerable intelligence actually had been gathered by the Air Force and Army, indicating German preparations but there was a lapse in evaluation between air and ground headquarters.¹

German commanders on the night of Dec. 15 had passed along to their troops the watchword from the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, “Forward to and over the Meuse." Objective was Antwerp on the Belgian coast.²

More than 200,000 combat troops, moving up over trails and roads matted with straw to muffle the noise, had gathered during the night in a forward assembly area 90 miles long and about three miles in depth, prepared to kick off Dec. 16 on "Christrose,'' on a 60-mile front, with five armored divisions, 12 2/3 infantry divisions, 500 medium tanks and supported by the fire of 1,900 guns and Werfers.

U.S. forces in the path of the attack totaled four and two-thirds divisions, with an effective strength of about 83,000 men on a meandering front of 104 miles.³ VIII Corps was south of the 99th Infantry Division and the 535th, and the nearest VIII division, the 106th, just south of 14th Cavalry Group, was newly-arrived from the United States. Two other corps divisions, the 28th and Fourth, were "weary and casualtyridden" after intense fighting in November in Huertgen forest to the north. The front defended by VIII Corps was about three times as long as normally assigned to a defending force, by tactical doctrine. The V Corps front which included the 99th seemed "excessive" too, to a historian, but the V Corps commander had wished to free as many troops as possible for the Roer drive.⁴

The 99th Infantry Division's artillery and its protecting ack-ack guns were in position to feel part of the impact of the German effort on Dec. 16. Maj. Gen. Walter Lauer of the 99th recalled that the artillery was "well forward," in the Krinkelt-Rocherath areas, to give close support to the attack through the Siegfried line.⁵

In the morning, the 99th's lines were bombarded by massed German artillery and Werfers (multiple-tube rocket launchers). However, at the time the shelling seemed to have no special great significance. A limited counterattack had been expected on the shoulders of the Second and Ninety-Ninth divisions' drive, and a German infantry push later in the day was believed associated with this.⁶

All battery areas of the 535th were hit by shells. Some shell fragments wounded several Headquarters GIs in Bullingen as they were headed for breakfast. In C Battery, the Germans were "hitting us hard" and this time there were no duds, plenty of close ones, Capt. William Hughes, the Battery CO, recollected. At D Battery CP in Krinkelt, soldiers headed for the basement, and the shelling did not cease until about 8:20 a.m., the battery's JOURNAL stated. Enemy shells of heavy caliber smashed into the area of B Battery's first platoon and battery headquarters in Murringen, according to B BATTERY JOURNAL. The shelling in Krinkelt-Rocherath area lasted a considerable time, T/3 Bergstrom wrote. Some Medics lived near C Battery CP in a house that had been damaged badly when a buzzbomb was shot down nearby; the windows were boarded up and several cows were kept in the next room.⁷

Individual members of the battalion have vivid memories of some of the Dec. 16 action.

Pvt. Fat Lee of D Battery was sitting on guard on a halftrack when he heard "all kinds of explosions" some distance away. Thinking at first that someone was firing on buzzbombs, Lee looked around from the window of the truck, then, "here it comes," Lee remembered. Shells from 88 guns began exploding all around the 535th positions. Lee crouched as low as he could get on the forward part of the halftrack floor, "scared stiff."

Pfc. Creed Wilson was on a fringe of B Battery, in a hole with Pfc. Bacil Fisher, and they could hear vehicles moving. "I hear tanks coming and they aren't our tanks," Fisher exclaimed. Wilson laughed. He could not understand how Fisher could tell that these were enemy tanks. The noise in the distance finally ceased.

As truck-driver Wilson traveled in to the kitchen at the CP for breakfast, he customarily picked up other B

Battery men along the way, leaving enough to man the guns. On the morning of Dec. 16 Wilson stopped as usual near a .50-caliber machine gun hole. Ordinarily the men would come out and jump on the truck. This time there was no movement. When the hole was checked, it revealed the twisted remains of the gun and the bodies of Pfcs. Levandowski and Fox and Private Herrera. Pfc. Kaseworth had been wounded.⁸ T/5 Kim Bell, Medic with B Battery, who also saw the hole, said the gun "looked like a pretzel"-- the barrel had been split by the blast.

When men from B's gun units returned from breakfast by truck, "all hell broke loose," as Wilson recalls it. Men of his section could see German tanks moving over a hill through the snow. The tankmen had not spotted the 40mm but the gun section was alone in an isolated area and seemed to be facing real trouble. B Battery men moved out with their 40mm and machine gun, but left behind a large tent containing a decorated Christmas tree, and clothes drying on a barbed wire fence. At the time nobody seemed to know what to do, and "there didn't seem to be a road out of the area," Wilson recalled. But some of the B Battery men, after gathering in one place, separated again and dug in.⁹ Burp guns and other weapons were sounding in discordant din as the Germans moved closer.

At 10 a.m. a report was received by B Battery that Germans were counterattacking southeast of Murringen. One enemy tank had advanced into the 99th's positions and had been knocked out by an anti-tank gun about 11:30 a.m. Reports received by Capt. George Dickerson of B Battery indicated that the counterattack was "under control" but map overlays were prepared and distributed to the gun sections showing a regrouping area to be used in event a withdrawal was necessary, B BATTERY JOURNAL stated.

Information was distributed at 2:25 p.m. to A Battery platoons and sections regarding an advancing German force of about 50 men. Second platoon reported enemy shelling, and at 2:50 a truck and trailer were hit by shrapnel.¹⁰

By late in the day the situation still did not appear alarming.

At the 535th's CP in a small hotel in Bullingen disjointed reports had been received during the day, regarding enemy activity. A patrol had "infiltrated" under a smoke screen at one point, and several tanks were reported at a crossroads inside our lines. But there was nothing else to foreshadow a really serious offensive.

Supreme Headquarters on Dec. 16 released an announcement that the Germans had taken the offensive on most of the First Army front, and there had been a series of sharp counterattacks from the vicinity of Duren down along the front for 70 miles to the south, But SHAEF also reported that the attacks, extending south to Echternach, had been checked everywhere, usually after hours of severe fighting.¹¹ This report may have been heard by some 535th men at radios, but Duren and Echternach were only names on a map, and this was just one more communique out of many.

The battleline situation, as it developed on late Dec. 16, was deteriorating for the First Army. Some of the Germans' initial action was to punch holes so that the attacking forces could get on the Honsfeld-Bullingen road. By early afternoon strong German forces were pouring through the Lanzerath area, southeast of Bullingen, and a check after dark would have shown "a discouraging situation" in that area, in the words of an official historian. American tank destroyers were ordered at 4 p.m. to move to the vicinity. More TDs rolled into position south and southeast of Bullingen at midnight.¹²

A new day starts at midnight, and the opening of the memorable Dec. 17, 1944, gave definite indications of things to come.

At midnight all sections and CPs of A Battery were being hit by concentrated artillery fire, and 10 minutes later communication was cut to the switchboard. At Murringen, a heavy enemy barrage began hammering the B Battery area at 12:20 a.m., and by 1:30 all communications were disrupted, reportedly because of the shellings. This enemy barrage did not end until 4, and was resumed at 5:30. Around 12:30 Captain Hughes of C Battery was notified by the 535th's S-2 that enemy activity consisting of strong patrols and considerable troop movement was increasing east of C. All personnel were alerted and guards were increased.¹³

Shortly after midnight, the commanding officer of a battalion that had been part of the "Liege Diver Belt” and that was no longer authorized to fire at buzzbombs came into the 535th's CP at Bullingen. The new arrival, appearing definitely upset, told Colonel Francis he was pulling his men back, and said the 49th Antiaircraft Brigade had told him the Germans would be in Bullingen in the morning. The 535th's CO grinned, "We'll wait 'til we hear their rifle fire," he said, To the author of BATTALION FROM THE MOJAVE, who was also in the room, there was a question as to whether the grin was genuine or the colonel was merely trying to ease the minds of others present at the time. The grin was genuine, and Francis also wanted to reassure the others, he said in later years-- "panic could have started from remarks such as he made."

The new antiaircraft outfit had arrived only recently from the United States, and it already was related considerable mirth in the 535th that one of the new men had said, after three or four days in mud, without seeing any combat, that "people at home don't realize what we're going through."

However, Colonel Francis called Colonel Newton and the 99th Division G-2, talked with them and found they had no information that would substantiate the remarks of the new lieutenant colonel. Colonel Newton's Antiaircraft Group had received movement orders, but this was a routine move, as a Group CP was no longer needed in the area. The Group had been in charge of the Liege Diver Belt, which had been discontinued. The 99th Division G-2 told Francis there was nothing to indicate that a withdrawal by the 535th would be proper. Francis also telephoned Division artillery, and was informed that the battalion should "stay where you are."¹⁴ The two Battalion COs were to report to Butgenbach at 8 in the morning to receive orders.

Shelling was heavy and steady during the early morning hours. From Battalion CP the shells could be heard falling to our south, an unusual sound. No American artillery was answering from that direction. As far as we knew, however, Bullingen still was five miles behind the front lines.

In the Division artillery areas, where 535th men manned 40mm guns, halftracks, and machine guns in pits, the troops generally were spending a sleepless early morning.

Artillery fire in C Battery area was hotter than the previous day. Bergstrom described this in MY TRAVELS IN EUROPE:

Jerry had us zeroed in and was tossing everything from 88s and up. The barrage continued practically all night and the nearest hit to our aid station (in the Rocherath-Krinkelt neighborhood) missed us by about three feet. Due to the increased shelling we decided to stay up and not to attempt to sleep upstairs at all. It was bitter cold outdoors, and we huddled around the stove out of range of flying glass in case of a direct hit on our quarters.

At daylight the men went outside to the nearby C Battery kitchen, and after some hot coffee and food started looking around. They found that one building in the complex had been hit, a couple of men from another unit had been wounded, and the ground had been churned up by several shells.

Captain Bricker's A Battery CP that night was occupying one part of a Krinkelt building; cows were in the other end. Bricker and his executive officer, Lt. Mason Williams, could not sleep. Shelling "couldn't have been worse," Bricker said. Some of the hits were close.

In D Battery the heavy shelling was making Pfc. Doyle Butler wonder if he had made a mistake not leaving with some of the other ack-ack men earlier in the night for a new position. Butler, who had charge of a water-cooled machine gun, said he and his two helpers had spent three days digging and fixing up a good hole for themselves and their weapon. They had thought "we would probably be there all winter," Butler remembered. But at 10 p.m. the sergeant in charge got march orders, and Butler had been considerably peeved, although the Germans had been lobbing a few shells into the vicinity of the position ever since the 535th men moved there, a mile past Krinkelt. Doyle told his buddies that it was just more Army crap to move in the middle of the night in a bad storm. However, when the gun section had loaded there was not enough room for the machine gun and crew. One of the trucks had broken down that day and was in ordnance. The sergeant asked Butler if it would be all right if they came back for the machine gun crew in a short time. This was fine with Butler and his buddies, "as we had a nice warm fire and really hated to move."

But a short time after the gun section had pulled out, the Germans began pouring in a barrage.

Butler remembered:

I mean they were hitting all around us, and close, and it kept up this way all night. It was so dark we couldn't see anything, so we just stayed by the gun and waited. Just as it was getting daylight there was a hell of an explosion right beside our hole, and it took one-half of our roof off, and just went over our heads. After the barrage had slacked up for a few minutes we got out of the hole to take an inventory, and there was a hole about three feet deep and four feet long within a foot of our hole. One of the boys with me, Howard Bell--from Alabama and just naturally witty--looked at the shell hole for a while, shook his head and said, "Ah'm sure glad old Hitler didn't have another grain of powder in that one." If I hadn't been so scared I would have laughed.

(One of D Battery trucks finally picked up the machine gunners just before dark on Dec. 17.)¹⁵

In the B Battery area about the time the German barrage resumed at 5:30 a.m. large numbers of troops from the 23rd

Infantry, Second Division, arrived to bolster the hardpressed 99th. This battalion with a company each of tanks and tank destroyers took up positions south and east of Hunningen (Hunningen is a mile south of Murringen). Hightower's First Battalion watched through breaks in the fog in the morning as German tanks and other vehicles rolled toward Bullingen.¹⁶

At A Battery, the communications section had orders to check with the gun sections each hour, from the switchboard which was open all night. But when the second platoon was contacted, one of the gun sections did not respond, S/Sgt. Lloyd Adamson, the communications sergeant, said. "So my group drove out to check. It was Big Mac's section, and we met him walking down the road toward our headquarters. A shell had hit right in his halftrack, which carried the multiple M-51 mount." Two GIs were killed and three wounded by the direct hit, which was reported by Sgt. Noel McCallum at 7:30, the A BATTERY JOURNAL notes.

In Bullingen in the morning following breakfast-- the cooks "had done a fine job as usual," the 535th's CO recalled-- Colonel Francis walked out and got into his little American-built Ford V-8 which had been seized from the Germans and issued to him by the First Army. The writer of BATTALION FROM THE MOJAVE went with him and Cpl. Orrin Enger, the driver, to get material for the Battalion map board at Butgenbach, while the colonel got information and further orders. On the road we could hear plainly much firing just over the low hills which obscured our view to the south. This seemed to indicate a battle shaping up along an east-west line south of Bullingen, several miles from what had been a north-south front. As usual the colonel's face showed no expression.¹⁷

When we reached Butgenbach, we found Artillery headquarters in a turmoil.

"What's the story?" this book's writer asked a sergeant.

"It's all snafued," he said. "Paratroopers have captured Bullingen."¹⁸

"That can't be. We just came from there."

General Black, the Division Artillery commanding general, rushed in and told the people to pack, that they were moving back to Camp Elsenborn. In a brief conference with the Colonel, Black said the Germans had taken Bullingen, reported that Division Artillery was moving to Camp Elsenborn, and told the colonel to move the 535th CP to the same location. The colonel started out the door, with Van Arsdol. The 535th's messenger was sitting in his jeep in front where he had been stationed for days, waiting to carry any necessary dispatches to our outfit.

This was normal liaison and communication procedure in event that telephone or radio could not be used.¹⁹

The time apparently was about 7:45 a.m., as the Artillery headquarters was reported "alerted" at that time to move.²⁰

In Bullingen, Lt. Thomas P. Elliott had gone to Headquarters for breakfast. The house he had been sleeping in, with W/O Warren DuBois, Capt. Spencer Calderwood and the Medical Detachment, had been shelled. The occupants had stayed in the dwelling until the Germans got a bracket on the building, then they departed. At Headquarters, Lieutenant Elliott talked with Capt. James G. Craig, the S-2, and as the captain did not seem unduly alarmed, the lieutenant decided to shave.

About the time he was shaving some infantrymen passed through Bullingen, and informed some of the 535th people that the Germans would be there in a few minutes. None of the officers "made a move,"' several enlisted men were to recall later, and Captain Craig marked up this latest information on the situation map.

Colonel Francis told Enger and this writer nothing of what the general had said but we already knew it could not be good. On the way back to Bullingen we stopped at Dom Butgenbach and the colonel told Headquarters rear echelon to bring up the trucks so we could move to Camp Elsenborn. As we neared Bullingen on the road, the colonel told us to keep a sharp lookout. The sounds over the snowy hillocks to the south seemed more threatening, and it was not difficult to imagine Germans appearing on the road at any minute. We rolled into Bullingen, and two American soldiers in the road flagged down the car.

"Did you see any Germans down that road?" one asked,

The colonel said no, we had not. The GIs hesitated at the door, then they stepped back with drawn pistols, fear and hostility on their faces,

"Get out of that car!" one ordered.

The CO and the BATTALION FROM THE MOJAVE author stepped out, Our pistol-toting interrogators asked each of us if we were German, Finally they seemed convinced of our story that we were going to our outfit in the town and turned us loose,

"I think they were two scared infantrymen from an outfit that was pulling back," the colonel commented later. "They wanted all of us to pronounce 'Chicago.' This was probably caused by rumors-- substantiated later-- that Germans in American uniforms were operating behind the American lines. The fact that we appeared to be going east instead of west probably made them suspicious."

Also he said that "at the time it was alleged that Germans had trouble pronouncing 'Chicago'."

We pulled up at the CP, rushed inside and the colonel gave us the order to pack.

Lieutenant Elliott still was in the process of completing his shave when he looked up and out the window as a German halftrack lumbered by in the street. The lieutenant calmly wiped off his face, put on his jacket and carbine but failed to pick up his camera.

The packing at the CP, barely started, was interrupted abruptly by the sound of machine guns stuttering viciously in the street. The gunfire noise sent us backing from the hotel lobby into the hallway, with our rifles pointed at the door. A new sound, the "blam!" of a German 88, fired from someplace nearby, sent practically everyone scurrying for the basement. We heard another "blam!"' Colonel Francis was outside the hotel now where two of our trucks, empties, were parked; the drivers had stopped and come inside just before the shooting started. The majority of the men were moving back up the stairs. The CO, at the door now, with .45 pistol in hand, yelled, "Get the hell on!" We vaulted over the tailgates with our guns in new record time.

Lieutenant Elliott believes he was the last one out of the building, as he grabbed the code book, yelled for anyone else to get out, and grabbed the tailgate of the last truck while the vehicle was rolling. Pvt. Andrew Peterson, the last GI trying to get on one of the trucks, clutched at the tailgate on the run as the vehicle began picking up speed, finally had to let go and ran off toward the houses, The trucks, moving rapidly, passed the cluster of village homes, and we heard another "blam!" The driver of a jeep immediately behind us hurtled into the air; the jeep had been fired on by a German tank that had been hiding along the street, behind the last house on the left, The colonel saw the gun of the tank as we passed directly in front of the enemy vehicle,

"The bore of its gun was the cleanest I saw during the war," he said,

Lieutenant Elliott later recalled the vivid scene:

I can still see that tank bouncing up and down on its bogies from the recoil of the 88, and the machine gunner trying to get his gun down to cut loose on the street. I fired one round from my carbine at him and he disappeared-- but not from my shot, I'm sure, as I was sitting with my legs up over the tailgate and couldn't aim very good. That, incidentally, was the only shot I ever fired from that carbine.

The tank, which had not been there only minutes before when we returned in the CO's car, rolled ahead for several chilling seconds, but instead of turning and giving us some parting shots, headed back into Bullingen, probably hoping to knock off more fleeing American vehicles. We were afraid the road ahead of us had been cut, but the two trucks rolled on without any interruption and we finally reached Butgenbach, where we waited for any more of our vehicles that might have come out of the Bullingen "shooting gallery." The colonel's car still was back on the street in Bullingen, and T/5 Arcel (Art) Allsup's truck, several men said, had last been seen blazing in the street. We looked over our two getaway trucks-- one of the truck tarps was shredded by shrapnel and one tire was flat; holes had been cut by bullets in the radiator and windshield of the other vehicle.

Civilians already were joining in the flight; they were trudging out of Bullingen on foot with handcarts loaded with their belongings.

At the time Headquarters was run out of Bullingen by the tanks the men had nothing-- not even bazookas-- that could be used to fight tanks. Bazookas were not authorized by the Tables of Equipment. As a result of the Battle of the Bulge experiences, however, Headquarters did get bazookas for defense.

The 99th Division was informed "by 8:50" that enemy tanks and armored infantry were attacking Bullingen from the south and east.²¹ This report might have come from Headquarters, 535th, as we stopped in Butgenbach.

Almost the entire Service Battery of the 924th Field Artillery Battalion was captured in the vicinity of Bullingen.²²

A reconnaissance platoon of the 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion had just arrived, but only one section managed to evade the panzers. The rest of the platoon was killed or captured. The attacking columns destroyed a number of artillery planes on a nearby field and gunned down about 50 unarmed Americans at Bullingen.²³ The action had happened so fast that it was a little hard to tell just who had gone where. Someone in the 535th had seen Robert Schatz scrambling over a fence with a halftrack firing at him. Pfc. Leonard Bass had been seen running down a road, according to another report, with machine gun bullets kicking up the dirt at his heels, and he fell in a ditch. Later, when he showed up at Camp Elsenborn, another GI asked, "Did that tank catch you?" "It must not have," Bass replied. "I'm still here."

The German armored column which broke into Bullingen had taken this route because the road was a better one than a route a slight distance south, and also because a good supply of fuel was reported available in Bullingen. The tank men gassed up in the village, and also collected considerable booty including possibly some belongings of Headquarters Battery. Germans who entered Bullingen were led by Jochen Peiper-- his command later was involved in the Malmedy Massacre. Lead armor of his columns already was moving on when U.S. gunners started shelling Bullingen.²⁴

By 10:30 a.m. a long line of tanks and other vehicles was seen streaming through Bullingen, heading west-- bypassing Bullingen. This was in the break that had been torn in the 99th area after the front between the 99th and VIII Corps had been ripped open-- the 14th Cavalry Group south of the 99th had been overwhelmed rapidly, and the Germans poured through the gap. American fighter bombers were called in and blasted the tank columns during the morning. One of the tank men recalled later that progress was slow because of "choked roads and air raids" but this column out of Bullingen was the spearhead that scored the biggest gain of the day for the Germans.²⁵

Colonel Francis had received orders in Butgenbach to establish the 535th's headquarters in Camp Elsenborn, and decided that he would take one route, with Maj. Thomas Janney, the S-3 (operations officer), while Maj. Lee Burnham, with the part of Headquarters that had fled from Bullingen with the colonel, as well as other parts of Headquarters and Headquarters Battery that had joined us, should take another way to the new CP. The colonel and Janney took the shorter route, closer to the last known front line. He thought the route taken by the Burnham detachment, further west, would not expose the Battery unnecessarily. "Little did I know," he said.

Route of the Headquarters vehicles in the back areas was through a crossroads near Malmedy. Major Burnham stated that the convoy cleared this place 10 minutes ahead of the German column, which arrived during the noon hour. The Germans killed approximately 81 GIs in what was to become widely known as the Malmedy Massacre.²⁶

At the time the Germans broke into Bullingen, information on German activity was almost non-existent as lines of communication had been disrupted. Three wiremen from Battalion headquarters who had been repairing the line returned to the C Battery CP at 8 a.m. with news that the road to Bullingen had been cut by German armor, and that "street fighting" was in progress in the village. Rifle squads were formed from personnel of C Battery headquarters and dispatched to high ground east of Rocherath, with instructions to support infantry already digging in on that line.²⁷

George Bruining, Jr., of A Battery, who was supposed to go to Battalion headquarters, returned to his CP at 8:15 to report armor entering the village. "I couldn't get in," he told Captain Bricker. 'Bullingen was full of Germans and they were shooting." Bricker immediately took action for anti-tank defense, and at 9:15 a.m. all sections but two moved to anti-tank defense near the 924th Field Artillery, north of Rocherath.²⁸

Meantime, some 535th men remained stranded in Bullingen buildings and were attempting to decide what to do next.

One group of about 10 men had been housed in a building about a quarter of a mile from Battalion headquarters, closer to the German line.

Cpl. Art Imwalle, the D Battery clerk, recalled that the men heard movement outside in the dark of the morning, convoys moving with blackout lights. This plus the tremendous barrage of the pre-dawn period had aroused concern among the GIs, and a watch was maintained through the night in the kitchen.

In the morning the men had gone into the village to eat breakfast, most traveling by weapons carrier.

Corporal Imwalle had been sleeping in the same bed with Albert Provencio, but in a separate bag, and Provencio who had to go on kitchen police walked down to breakfast shortly before the German armored columns entered Bullingen.²⁹ Shooting and explosions close at hand gave notice of the arrival of the Germans. For about four hours, the 535th group outside the village remained stranded, spending part of the time holed up in a small building back of the building in which they had been living. Part of the front structure was shot off, and the 535th men also were being fired on by snipers. The GIs did not know which way to attempt an escape, whether to the top of a nearby snowy hill or in some other direction, Several ventured out but returned.

Finally the group took flight in a weapons carrier speeding through the main part of Bullingen, where shot-up buildings and vehicles could be seen. Corpses of GIs were draped over fences where they had been "picked off like ducks," Imwalle stated.

From the back door of the fleeing vehicle, Imwalle saw a German tank across the street pivoting and trying to get in position to blast the departing 535th vehicle. But the tank was not quick enough and the weapons carrier sped on, past snowy banks, and finally reached the American lines.³⁰

Elsewhere in the 535th area, Dec. 17 also had been an extra long day and full of action.

About Beeman with T/5 Karl Schlegel and a driver, Pfc. Lowell Wolhueter, started from a D Battery house at Krinkelt, traveling toward Bullingen. Schlegel was to take reports to Battalion headquarters.

Pvt. Emmett Rampley had left about 15 minutes earlier to get water, and the three D Battery men saw his truck on the road a short distance from Battalion headquarters. Burning gas from the vehicle was running across the road. At the moment, the three in the jeep did not realize that the truck had been blasted by a tank. Later, S/Sgt. Beeman saw the dead driver's feet hanging out of the vehicle.

To coast through the gas and fire, Pfc. Wolhueter cut the jeep ignition. This action probably saved the 535th men from more serious consequences, in Schlegel's opinion. A Mark IV (Panther) tank had been dug into a bank just across the rise and was primed for the jeep with its 75mm gun-- "the tank was stopping traffic, that's for sure," Beeman said.

The tank gunner, apparently figuring on more speed for the jeep, fired a shot from about 150 feet that hit the front of the machine, blowing it off the road. His aim had been better on the truck, as he had smashed a shell right into the cab.

The driver was thrown out of the jeep as it caromed into a ditch, and the passengers were bounced out about the time the vehicle stopped. S/Sgt. Beeman did not hear the explosion but "I was knocked half out of my head" by the blast; the concussion almost completely shut off his hearing, and in later years he was bothered by the old injury. Schlegel was hit by some shrapnel. Both scurried behind the jeep when men in the tank started to machine gun the entire area. Then they started crawling along the ditch away from the tank, and when they reached Pfc. Wolhueter they found he had been burned badly on the face and head. His companions helped drag the driver back through the ditch, and the ditch shielded them as they retreated to the CP.

A colonel from a tank destroyer -unit: dispatched three TDs to the area, and TD men talked to Beeman in trying to pinpoint the German tank's location. The TDs fired over a hill but could not knock out the intruder. Finally, by use of radio, help was obtained from a rocket-firing Typhoon which zoomed in and disposed of the tank.

A halftrack was called in to provide protection for the battery's already-shell-damaged CP. D Battery was supposed to hold fast but "there was not much to hold fast with," according to Schlegel.³¹

From about 9 a.m. the battery and platoons were under intense artillery fire and everyone "did a lot of sweating," it was reported.³²

BATTERY JOURNAL also noted the continued heavy shelling in the morning daylight, and reported that one shell smashed on the roof of B Battery CP. P-47s flew in to strafe and divebomb the enemy lines at 8:30. Half an hour later, order was received for B Battery to withdraw, and first platoon and Battery headquarters rolled back to Krinkelt. The 371st Field Artillery Battalion, which was being protected by B, also moved during the day, to the vicinity of other artillery on the constricting 99th Division front.³³

Tremendous noise and lack of solid information about what was happening out of sight on the battlefront were the two major characteristics of the Ardennes conflict as it developed on Dec. 17. Often, noise was the only tip-off about what was happening.

On the northern flank of the Battle of the Bulge, American artillery now was shelling heavily and the Germans were replying frequently, much more often than we had ever heard before. There was never a quiet moment. Explosions, rustling and whistling of shells, rumbling and crunching continued throughout the day, and was to go into the night without let-up. In addition, a large number of V-ls were hurtling over. This same clamorous situation was to prevail for a number of days and nights. As yet, none of the 535th soldiers were aware of what was at stake, although we knew that something considerably out of the ordinary was under way,

Communication had broken down rapidly during the German attack,³⁴ and trying to bring some order out of the seeming chaos was a major undertaking. ‘''Roads were blocked and all was in a state of confusion," said a D BATTERY JOURNAL entry for Dec, 17. As another example of the dilemma, Captain Bricker said his A Battery was supposed to get orders from the artillery battalion it was protecting, but no orders were. forthcoming. A Battery men were dispersed and told to wait until orders were received. One report received at 10:30 a.m. at A Battery stated that tanks were approaching Krinkelt from Bullingen. Bricker made a route reconnaissance to Elsenborn at 12:30 but at 2:30 the CO of the 924th Field Artillery ordered the unit to stay in position and dig in.³⁵

Communications crews were busy trying to link up the various units of the 535th.

Among these were Lloyd Adamson, A Battery's communications sergeant. He and other men had gathered up all their wire and radio equipment and other gear and moved out of town into some deep woods following a march order. Then communications had to go to work connecting up all the sections. Adamson remembered:

The shell fire, incoming, was fierce here. At one point some general stopped me and a couple of my crew and said:

"Go get rid of that weapons carrier. You're a foot soldier now."

But we were repairing lines at the time and he didn't know who we were, so we kept right on doing our job. I remember being so tired that my head ached, and when we finally had everything fixed again we didn't even dig in to sleep. We just piled down and, even with all the shells coming down, we slept the sleep of the utterly exhausted.

That same night, however, they were awakened to join the retreat out of the Krinkelt-Rocherath area.

Of the communications and command situation in general at the time of the Breakthrough, Colonel Francis commented:

I always tried to maintain flexibility in command and to give the battery commanders maximum leeway in handling their batteries. When the Bulge hit, I told the battery commanders to maintain constant liaison with the field artillery battalion they were covering, to move when they moved and to report their location promptly, by the fastest means available. This they did and everything worked out well. This was in accordance with standard tactical doctrine.

Due to loss of our own Headquarters communication equipment, we had, for a time, to rely on field artillery

communications. This is why I first set up our own CP with the 99th Division Artillery CP in Camp Elsenborn. Capt. Eugene Lash and W/O Donald Decker quickly obtained new equipment, and then we could establish our own separate CP. Major Janney told me that because of the promptness with which our batteries reported that he could frequently tell Division artillery where their battalions were before they knew themselves.

The account in this chapter so far has dealt with the events of Dec. 16 and early Dec. 17, the displacement of Headquarters Battery, and the communication problem. Dec. 17 proved to be a long and memorable day, and a good share of the exciting incidents involved the 40mm batteries which were scattered along the front, in the area of the 99th Infantry Division's artillery. Some of the action involving those units will be related in this chapter.

None of the troops of the 535th, in Headquarters or the 40mm batteries, had much coherent idea of the over-all battle picture at this confused time.

The Germans, it was learned later, were surprised by the stubborn defense in the 99th and Second Division area. Although the defending American troops had been "badly shaken," as one historian wrote, they had managed to hang on, during Dec. 16, and on the second day of the assault as well.³⁶ A rough battle was continuing in the area around the 535th units. At 10:30 a.m. the 99th Infantry Division had been ordered to withdraw and dig in at new positions about a mile and one-half east of Rocherath. The 395th Regiment of the 99th with a battalion of the 393rd were attached to the Second Division. The Second's battalions were ordered to blow up all pillboxes taken in their recent drive into the Siegfried line.³⁷ First Infantry Division troops had been brought in to bolster the line, and one regimental CP was set up at Butgenbach, Colonel Francis said.

Now we turn back to the story of the 535th.

Some of the developments that startled D Battery of the 535th on the morning of Dec. 17 were described earlier,

The battery's first platoon firing units were forced to take up new positions "below Krinkelt" with the field artillery, according to D BATTERY JOURNAL, which also states that the platoons were separated from Battery headquarters and trying to keep with the 99th's artillery,

Two graphic accounts of activity as seen by individual Battery troops on Dec. 17 have been provided by Myron Meixner, a cook, and Pvt. Fat Lee.

In the afternoon, Meixner said, a lieutenant told him to take field glasses, go to the top of a hill and see what was happening. Meixner went to the hilltop, and saw one of the gun sections being shelled. The 535th men would run in all directions, and every time they returned the shells "would follow them right up," Meixner noted. The cook saw puffs of fire and smoke coming from some woods, and observed approximately 18 German tanks coming down a road, soldiers crawling along hedges and guns firing at them.

"All of a sudden"-- Meixner remembered-- he heard a shell "screaming right at me." The GI, who was standing in a foxhole, ducked down, his helmet flew off and the shell exploded 30 to 40 feet away, throwing dirt all over him. Meixner decided it was time to depart from his observation point. After he left, the shelling seemed to cease. Later, the American troops were informed that the fire in the hollow was being directed by three German spies-- two women and a man-- in a church steeple at Krinkelt, Meixner said. He also reminisced:

We had everything loaded to pull out, but a call came that we were cut off and we were to stay there. So Lt. James C. McKinney told me and my kitchen helper, Pvt. Jurien Westerduin, to unload some stuff and make coffee. We started to unload, and the other boys built a fire because everyone was so cold. As we were pulling the cook stove out of the trailer, a shell hit right in the tree. There was a lot of commotion around. I ducked. So did my helper. But he couldn't get back up. I looked at his leg which was about six inches from mine and sure enough he had been hit with shrapnel in the back of his knee.

Private James Wade was hit in the back digging a trench. He died later. Private Tanner was hit in the helmet and he just got his head scratched. Quite a few of the boys got smaller wounds. It was a miracle I didn't even get a scratch.

There were two 5-gallon gas tanks sitting just a few feet away-- they got smashed flat. The tarp over the trailer had hundreds of holes in it.

Meixner forgot about the coffee. The German shelling resumed again, and, as the cook recalls it, "we all thought, this is the end of us." Then Lieutenant McKinney advised, "let's try to get out of here." The 535th men hooked up the trailer and started out but got stuck in the snow. Several wanted to unhook the trailer and abandon the vehicle, but Meixner objected, as all of the cooking equipment was aboard. So the troops all dismounted, pushed, and were able to get the trailer rolling.

The Germans were shooting at Meixner's gun section and other nearby gun sections, and "it looked like fire was flying everywhere." Someone said the Germans must be shooting phosphorous shells. Krinkelt was not far away, but Meixner and others in the vicinity were informed they could not go any further as the roads were blocked for miles. Meixner remembered that "all of the GIs were scrambling around trying to crawl into cellars and everywhere." A big U.S. tank was rolling into the area which the D Battery men were leaving behind, and a soldier on top of the armored monster inquired:

Is it that bad there?

At this place the 535th men saw the three civilians who allegedly had directed the shell fire on the American troops. They were being held in the back of a building.

That night (Dec. 17) the D Battery men were able to move on from their positions.

For Fat Lee, also of D Battery, Dec. 17 also was an exciting one. He had awakened at his halftrack, which had stopped after a pull-out of D Battery troops the night before-- the artillery had departed earlier, Lee said-- and saw antitank guns moving up but "they looked kind of small," and the men in the infantry column marching up did not appear much larger than the 5-foot 3-inch Lee.

During the day the 535th men went to the edge of a hill, looked down and across and saw German tanks rolling and firing at U.S. anti-tank guns and tank destroyers. Some of the U.S. armor was blazing.

"There goes another of our tanks, burning up," said Sgt. Howard Eastin, and Lee saw tears in the sergeant's eyes.

Eastin told Marshall Botbyl to drive his halftrack up on the hill. The GIs discussed whether to open fire on the tanks with the halftrack. Lee thought that "we're goners" if the lightweight ack-ack gun were turned on the panzers. Finally the halftrack was brought back down the hill so that the Germans would not spot the 535th positions.

P-47s zoomed in over the combat area "like they were mad," Lee said, and a short time later they were engaged in a dogfight with German planes. Lee, who was manning the machine guns in his halftrack, got a chance to fire on Luftwaffe craft during the day, just one of numerous Battalion men similarly engaged.

In the C Battery area 535th Medics helped spot planes for a gunner manning the ring-mount machine gun on a 2 1/2ton truck until a C Battery lieutenant told the machine gunner to stop firing, as ammunition was running low and the battery was cut off from Headquarters and supplies, T/3 Bergstrom said.

A good day of shooting on Dec. 17 had aided the morale of the men, Captain Hughes stated in a report of the action written later. For the first time since Normandy, the 535th had seen the Luftwaffe out in force and had "done a good job of diverting his attention from strafing and dive bombing our troops and installations," Hughes commented. After two ME 109s had been shot down by C Battery personnel, other German planes remained at a high altitude, out of the range of the 40mms.³⁸

The German planes, mostly ME 109s, began appearing over the 535th's area at 9:25 a.m., and firing by the 535th ack-ack continued sporadically until 4:40 p.m. As many as 10 to 12 planes roared in at a time, and a number of the aircraft were shot down or damaged.³⁹

One historian estimated that the Luftwaffe flew 600 to 700 sorties during the day in aid of the German ground forces, mainly in the St. Vith area.⁴⁰

But the heaviest blow by far was on the ground; in fact, the Germans seemed ready to close a big noose Dec. 17 on the 99th-Second Division front.

Maj. Gen. Leonard Gerow of V Corps had plans under way to set up a defensive position at Elsenborn. But the Second Division had to be withdrawn first. Troops had to defend the single road from Krinkelt-Rocherath to Wirtzfeld (Krinkelt is a mile and one-half from Wirtzfeld) and also hold open the "one-track" road from Wirtzfeld to Elsenborn, a distance of three miles. Along these roads, this single route, a considerable part of the 535th Battalion, in addition to the 99th Division Artillery and other 99th troops, also Second Division troops, equipment and vehicles had to travel if they were to pull back successfully from the German assault. Murringen, a short distance to the south, faced encirclement and the chances for a successful retreat from there dwindled by the hour.⁴¹

The Germans had made a deep penetration to the east, and as the official historian stated, the 99th's center, east of the twin villages of Rocherath-Krinkelt, was "collapsing." Rocherath had been only three miles from the front. The attacking Germans were "liable at any moment to come bursting out of the forest," and there were no more reserves-- the 99th had "long since" committed its last. In addition, the commanders still were concerned about prospects of a large-scale armored attack from Bullingen, only a mile and one-half south of

Wirtzfeld on the vital retreat road. Rumors had spread through the Second Division that U.S. prisoners were being butchered in cold blood by S.S. troops in the attack. The Second's withdrawal was continuing, with an artillery barrage shielding the action. In woods less than 1,000 yards from Rocherath, firing continued as darkness closed over the U.S. positions.

"A thick fog lay close to the snow-covered ground," historian Hugh M. Cole wrote. "Around was a scene of wild confusion, stragglers with and without arms hurrying across the road and across the fields, the sound and flash of gunfire coming from the woods to the east."⁴²

(At one time during the night of Dec. 17 German tanks actually broke into Krinkelt, and retreating troops of the 99th were intermixed with the Germans.)⁴³

The main consideration late on Dec. 17 for much of the 535th personnel remained whether they would be able to get out of the pocket successfully.

Available records indicate that units of A and B batteries were the last of the battalion in pulling out, following not far behind C Battery. A and B both had to leave some equipment on the retreat route.

The withdrawal, and incidents immediately preceding, are well remembered by many of the former GIs.

Bergstrom, who was at the C Battery CP, said "our morale hit an all-time low" on the afternoon of Dec. 17 when an infantry platoon trudged in, from along the road, and said the soldiers in the area were cut off from Bullingen and their own lines. About the same time five American tanks rolled in and "silently waited for any trouble in Krinkelt-- they were more than welcome," Bergstrom said.

The CP was moved to a farmhouse near Artillery CP, and "just in time," Hughes remembered. Germans in American uniforms and vehicles were in the area spreading rumors, and the men were getting demoralized. This move to a new CP was made about 3:30 p.m., and the men were informed that after dark an infantry unit was to be brought up to open the road back to the American lines; a convoy was to be formed to take the 105mm and ack-ack guns to safety.⁴⁴

The commanding officer of the 776th Field Artillery Battalion had called Hughes to his CP, admitted he was inexperienced and asked for Hughes' opinion of the situation. He said the troops were cut off and that he was waiting for march orders. The code word "Dynamite" was to be used, Hughes remembered:

Having been in the area for some time and having done some snooping on my own, I knew of a road through the woods leading eventually back to the Elsenborn Ridge that I felt was still clear.⁴⁵

The artillery colonel asked if Captain Hughes would lead the column for his big guns and C Battery, when march order was received. Hughes also remembered:

Our cook, S/Sgt. Theodore Forbes, prepared us a big meal-- as I recall, pork chops, gravy and all the trimmings. I opened a pint of gin and all of the officers had a stiff snort-- wasn't enough for all the men-- and we packed up, awaiting "Dynamite."

At 7 p.m., march order was received, and half an hour later, B Battery of the 776th, C Battery headquarters and second platoon and some of the 535th's Medical Detachment moved out as the first serial.⁴⁶ The Germans were reported within a few hundred yards of the CP when the vehicles rolled out. Captain Hughes took his jeep to the head of the column, which crept at a slow pace in the darkness toward Krinkelt and the ridge. Among those on the convoy was T/3 Bergstrom, who described the journey:

The trip seemed endless. We were dead-tired, enemy planes were overhead and small-arms fire was heard on all sides of us. From our slow-moving, blacked-out vehicles, we could see ammunition dumps and villages burning behind us in the night.

As the vehicles were inching along the road in darkness, a GI from the artillery unit ran up and asked if there were any Medics around. Captain Stanley Lowe responded, and the newcomer whispered something to him, Bergstrom said.

The captain ran down the road with the GI, several vehicles distant, where a truck driver had been crushed to death in the cab of his truck. In the darkness the driver had not seen the barrel of the big 105mm gun ahead of hin, and when the gun vehicle stopped suddenly, the barrel crashed through the windshield, killing the driver.

About an hour later, Captain Lowe ran back to the Medics' truck, and as he pulled up at the truck, he panted:

This was the first time I realized I'm getting old.

Route of the convoy led through Krinkelt, which was being attacked by German infantry, Small arms and mortar fire were reported "intense" but a defiladed escape route was still open west of town, so the vehicles moved through safely.⁴⁷

Captain Hughes' driver was unable to see the dark road, so the captain walked in front of the jeep through RocherathKrinkelt and down the roads through the woods and finally to the hard road on the Elsenborn Ridge where MPs then directed the convoy to the open route that should be used.

Bergstrom thought the convoy must have “inched” its way down the road for a couple of hours after the gun accident, and the GIs were so tired that "we dozed off to sleep in spite of the gun fire around and the planes overhead." Just before midnight,⁴⁸ the vehicles arrived at Sourbrodt. The Medics stopped at a combination meat market, restaurant and living quarters.

"We rolled our sleeping bags out on the floor, uttered a prayer of Thanksgiving, and went to sleep,” Bergstrom said.

A check of personnel and equipment showed no loss during the withdrawal.

Battery CP was in Krinkelt on Dec. 17, set up in a house in town. The gun sections had dug into positions, under heavy enemy artillery fire, around the 371st Field Artillery Battalion at the northern end of Krinkelt, B BATTERY JOURNAL states. This was after the fire units first had taken up temporary positions in a field adjacent to Krinkelt.

T/5 Kim Bell, Medic who dug a hole with some other 535th personnel near town, said the Germans were sending "screaming meemies" down the street-- they made ''a real shrill whistle, sounded like a darned wildcat."' The enemy also was firing 88s into the American-held town.

Firing seemed to be getting stronger, and Lt. John Conroy lacked communications with the guns, so he went out to see what was happening, to see if any of the guns had been overrun. During the time he was gone, a German shell exploded in his foxhole. Much noise was continuing in the area, and the GIs in B Battery area were not sure which way they might have to head.

Tanks and infantry of the Second Division moved up, and about the same time reports were received in B Battery that units of the 99th were trapped. Numerous tracers were streaking the night sky, and flares were being fired, so that at times the area was lit up even in the night almost like daylight-- "you couldn't be sure who was looking at you,” T/5 Bell recalled,

Battery B destroyed files and papers as completely as possible at 7:30 p.m. Half an hour later, small-arms and machine-gun fire at the rear of B's CP gave evidence of the oncoming German infantry. Battery headquarters and first platoon personnel attempted to join the fire units but "this was impossible due to heavy traffic on the road," according to B BATTERY JOURNAL. Headquarters sections moved with the traffic to a rendezvous point at Camp Elsenborn, arriving there at 11:45 p.m.

Captain Dickerson returned to aid the first platoon sections in the retreat. The 371st Field Artillery Battalion withdrew some of its equipment at 10 p.m., and first platoon fire units also joined in the departure.⁴⁹

The night sky, Pfc. Creed Wilson said, was filled with flashes and explosions as the battery personnel worked getting out their equipment. The hooked up in the blackout, in mud and rain. Wilson was able to get out his truck, 40mm and machine gun, but Harold Gluth had to leave his truck, and some of the 40mm guns and machine guns of the first platoon were left behind.

"The Germans were coming in fast," Wilson said. "We thought they had us."

Men were grabbing for places on vehicles, trying for a ride any possible way on the retreat road, and a considerable number piled onto Wilson's truck.

T/5 Bell helped drive out of the Krinkelt area a halftrack whose PFC driver was suffering from shock. One of the section sergeants, from Louisiana, winched the vehicle out of mudholes by attaching the winch to trees and posts. About 30 GIs were riding on top, hanging all over, mostly 99th Division men. The halftrack bogged down in the mushy terrain three or four times. "We hadn't the slightest idea where we were going," Bell stated. However, Lt. Conroy knew the general direction, and the men of the 535th and other retreating troops had only one choice actually, to the west, away from Krinkelt-Rocherath. A considerable number of troops were trudging in foot in the darkness, and a number had thrown away their packs. The action continued hot in the Krinkelt area, and flares lit the darkness.

B's first platoon arrived at Camp Elsenborn at 3 a.m. Dec. 18 without three of its 40mm guns, one machine gun, two trailers and one truck that had bogged down in the mud.⁵⁰ Bell believes the trucks could not have travelled the route which the halftrack followed to Camp Elsenborn.

Heavy equipment of the 371st field artillery, which B Battery had been defending, bogged down in marshy ground when it tried to reach Elsenborn via a small road just north of Krinkelt. The artillery had tried to use the Krinkelt-Rocherath Road, but it was cut at the time by the enemy. Howitzers of the 371st were lost.⁵¹

BATTLE BABIES, history of the 99th Division, states that the 924th Artillery was the last to get withdrawal orders. This outfit began pulling out in complete darkness about 9 p.m., through what was called a hail of fire, Dante's Inferno. Three of the 924th's howitzers bogged down on the way.⁵²

A Battery of the 535th rolled out in convoys at 9 and 9:30 p.m. About this time German tanks had penetrated Krinkelt and were blasting anything that moved, by the light of flares, Captain Bricker said. However, a reconnaissance by Lts. Joseph Logsdon and Macy Cohen revealed a slackening of artillery fire at Rocherath-Krinkelt, with sporadic small arms fire. The captain decided that the route still was open, and the convoy traveled through town and northwest toward Elsenborn.

About one mile west of Krinkelt the road was found blocked by many abandoned vehicles including trailers. The convoys tried to bypass the stalled equipment by winching through the adjacent muddy fields for about one hour, while under artillery fire too. The CO of the 924th Field Artillery Battalion gave the order to abandon equipment. The men were assembled at intervals of five yards, and all 535th men were present, a check-up disclosed.

"We started to walk, crossed a creek and climbed a hill and found a road," Adamson said. He added:

The road was like a quagmire. I recall Pancho Martinez stepped in a puddle of water and going down clear up to his neck. Everyone was shedding overcoats and any other extra weight that they were carrying. Lots of equipment was left along that road.

I know, because by this time I had fallen back to the rear. I never could walk very far. Harry Elbert, our Motor Pool sergeant, also had fallen to the rear. We had gone just as far as we could go. So we walked over to the side of the road and sat down.

At that time I realized just how the fatalists felt, because even if the Germans had been 10 feet behind I would still have sat down.

Just as the rest of our Battery was fading into the distance, a convoy of trucks came up the road, going the same way we were going. They stopped and we piled on. It was B Battery. So A Battery rode on with Battery B. We had no radio equipment, no telephone equipment, no nothing.

Captain Bricker and Lieutenant Mason Williams joined Captain Dickerson of B Battery in the lead jeep, and the convoy proceeded to Camp Elsenborn in the early morning hours.⁵³

Meantime, in the early morning of Dec. 18, massed artillery on both sides continued their heavy pounding. Pvt. Donald Allen described one such projectile in a poem "Artillery:"

This sound was multiplied manyfold as great quantities of shells were sent crashing out of the guns along the flaming front.

The army's official historian said later that "the accuracy and weight of the defensive concentrations laid on from Elsenborn ridge must also be accounted one of the main reasons the American infantry were not completely overrun during the night assaults of the 17th and 18th."⁵⁵

As the heavy artillery dueling continued through the night, some 535th troops continued to straggle in, and the troops tried to determine who was still missing.

No. 7 halftrack from D Battery rolled back to Elsenborn in the night. Its passengers included the three men wounded in the early-morning tank blast at the jeep. Maj. Lee Burnham met the group at Elsenborn and advised them to "get set up for guard," T/5 Schlegel recalled. No one knew what was going to happen next.⁵⁶

One small group that did not reach the 535th at Elsenborn until the morning of Dec. 18 consisted of Capt. William Carlin, 2nd Lt. Richard Foreman, W/O Harold Neff, Cpl. Warren Holden and T/5 Arcel Allsup, who had been trapped in a house in Bullingen by the unexpected arrival of the German armor.

Their story of being holed up in the cellar of a Bullingen building was one of the most unusual of the Bulge campaign for the 535th.

Holden, a Headquarters Battery man, said he was just putting on his shoes on Dec. 17 when he heard a German burp gun. He finished dressing in a hurry. Neff had been up earlier, and had gone to Headquarters mess about 6:30 or 7, a block from the house where he was staying. Neff was returning to his quarters when he heard burp guns which sounded quite close. However, he could see no tanks. Neff met Holden coming along the street in a 2 1/2-ton truck, stopped him "and suggested we go back and load our bed rolls and other belongings in the truck in case we have to get out." The advice turned out to be lucky, Holden told Associated Press Correspondent Wes Gallagher later, as he found out that German tanks were rumbling down the street he had planned to take. The corporal backed down the street to the front of the house.

About this time the 535th men observed one or more tanks heading down the street. Neff and Holden scampered for safety, and stood in a doorway looking out on the main street, partially blocked by the truck. When the tank was a short distance away, the vehicle's 88 blasted at the truck, and fine shrapnel sprayed through a window. Neff was hit at this time in the upper thighs and groin area, but did not notice the wound until some days later when the small fragments began bothering him.

Neff and Holden were joined, approximately this time, by Carlin, Foreman and Allsup. Allsup's speedy entry through a doorway, after German halftracks and tanks rolled in, was described by him later in the rear echelon at Verviers.

"An old civilian about 900 years old threw up his hands," Allsup recalled. "I said, 'That's all right, I'm not after you, Jackson.'"

The 535th men, who had sought the security of the basement, watched a tank go by and stop at a nearby road fork, apparently taking a position. Then there was quiet for a while, and the Americans huddled against a wall on the dirt floor to be as inconspicuous as possible.

During the day they saw through the window a civilian stick his head out of a house window, and they observed a German soldier helping a wounded Wehrmacht man along the main street. They debated about firing but decided it would be a tip-off to their hiding place.

Around mid-afternoon the weather cleared a little and American planes started bombing. Up to this time, as Neff recalled, the stranded men had not talked much because of fear that German troops might be near the house, but when the bombing started they began discussing escape, in low voices. Bombing, as well as possible heavy shelling, could threaten their safety in Bullingen.

Any sudden noise was distinctly disturbing, as Allsup told about it later. The village would be quiet for a few minutes and the GIs could hear a rooster crow, "then all hell would break loose," maybe P-47s diving on the Germans, tanks firing or shells whistling and smashing. "I aged 10 years in that cellar," Allsup declared.

Neff said:

We decided to wait until just before dark and try to sneak out along the shadows of the building. We had had nothing to eat since breakfast and no one seemed to know of any rations in the house. My bag was on a landing between the first and second floors with a bottle of Scotch in it. I sneaked up and got it and we all consumed it late in the P.M. just before taking off.

Holden, who was toting a sub-machine gun, volunteered to lead, and the five GIs slipped out, keeping in house shadows in the dusk, heading toward what they believed to be the American lines. They had passed along some woods in the near-dark when they suddenly found themselves "looking down the barrel of a M-1," held by an infantryman. Neff was taken to the platoon's commanding officer, but the other four had to "stay put" until the infantry was convinced they were Americans. From the platoon, the 535th men were escorted to the Battalion CP, where a lieutenant colonel provided the new arrivals with hot coffee and food before questioning them on the position of any German tanks or troops. Next morning-- Dec. 18-- the five 535th men were driven to Camp Elsenborn.

During the new day, Dec. 18, most of the American troops who had displaced toward the Elsenborn area were getting set up in new positions, or still moving.

Clearance of the brief German penetration of Krinkelt-Rocherath had eased the passage of the withdrawing GIs.

From midnight on, men and vehicles of the 99th Division and attached units had poured through the villages, and the withdrawal continued all night.⁵⁷

Just before light, the Germans resumed their attack at Krinkelt-Rocherath and rugged fighting was under way there during the day. The U.S. infantry was bolstered by firing of the guns from Elsenborn Ridge-- the Second Division artillery, most of the guns of the 99th, and corps field artillery battalions.⁵⁸

D Battery continued a fatiguing reshuffling of positions on Dec. 18, somewhat similar to the previous day. The CP of the battery was moved on Dec. 18 from Camp Elsenborn to Sourbrodt because of heavy enemy shelling of the camp, and first platoon CP was established about two miles from Sourbrodt. The ack-ack guns were set up in protection of the 372nd Field Artillery.⁵⁹

As remembered by D Battery's Pvt. Fat Lee, Dec. 18 was a day of rear-guard action, fought mostly by the artillery. The ack-ack men were digging in, while the big guns dueled back and forth. When Cpl. Clifford Grasman would hear an 88 shell whistling through the air, he would yell "hit the dirt!" and the GIs scrambled for foxholes.

Lee recalled especially the bravery of the artillery men, standing at their weapons, blasting at the oncoming panzers and German infantry. When one of the gunners would get hurt, another took his place, but finally they did not have enough replacements and moved out, Lee said. He also commented:

For us that afternoon, I feel, was the worst. We lost our trailer and I thought we might lose the half-track too. It was so muddy, and the dirt was so soft. A bulldozer had to come along to pull us out.

At the next stop on Dec. 18 the D Battery men caught up with the artillery and Lee's halftrack stopped by a tree, where the men camouflaged the position. An anti-tank gunner told the ack-ack men his gun had been part of a group of eight; on Dec. 17 the number had dwindled to four, and now only one was left.

Corporal Grasman and Private Lee walked to a nearby artillery headquarters later in the day and asked an officer about the current situation. The officer looked through his field glasses and told the 535th pair the German tanks were not far away-- "they are on our tails." When Lee and Grasman returned downhill, the artillery and anti-tank gun were pulling out, It was almost dark when Doyle Butler and a lieutenant arrived and led the 535th to a new area,

Pfc. Koerber, another 535th man moving with D Battery, had pulled into a place called Robertville at 1 a.m. and departed at 1 p.m., finally reaching Sourbrodt at 8 p.m. He wrote at the time:

We have been on our feet for three days and are ready to drop. We pulled in with an artillery outfit

that was moved up for support so we went to sleep and let the 155s do the firing.⁶⁰

These guns and many others did plenty of firing. The D BATTERY JOURNAL states that the heavy artillery "kept up an almost continuous barrage" on the night of Dec. 18-19.

A Battery had assembled on the morning of Dec. 18 and was billeted at Camp Elsenborn.⁶¹

The headquarters of C Battery had been established in a meat market at Sourbrodt. In the morning the unit made contact with its first platoon, which was still in positions west of Kalterherberg, Germany. On Dec. 18 the first platoon, in support of the 955th Field Artillery Battalion, withdrew to Sourbrodt.

"We had suffered no casualties in either platoon," Captain Hughes stated.⁶²

B Battery was checking its equipment shortages. Requisitions were sent in for material, clothing and equipment lost.

At 4 p.m. on Dec. 18 the B Battery second platoon, which had been engaged in anti-aircraft defense of the 99th Division's CP, was relieved, and attached to the 924th Field Artillery Battalion in the vicinity of Camp Elsenborn.⁶³

Headquarters still was reorganizing at Camp Elsenborn on Dec. 18, was trying to keep in touch with the situation and was making contact with the line batteries.⁶⁴ Most Headquarters men had lost practically all of their possessions except what they were wearing, or guns they carried. Typical was Cpl. Everett Gray, who wrote to his wife in Norfolk, Va., later that "I managed to get away with my pants." Gray lost his Christmas presents and some champagne and cognac that had been sent to him by Belgian friends.⁶⁵

News continued almost impossible to get, for the 535th. But a Dec. 17 story,⁶⁶ published in the United States Dec. 18 under the byline of Harold Denny, newsman on the First Army front, stated that the Germans had thrown a number of divisions into the attack including some crack ones, in a drive that had pierced the U.S. lines. Denny also stated:

The Germans are supporting these divisions with everything in their arsenal--scores of paratroopers, who were dropped behind our lines in an effort to disrupt our supplies and communications, and tanks and aircraft in more lavish numbers than they have thrown at us at any time

since Normandy. And for the past two days they have been tossing over V-weapons in far greater numbers.

First Army also learned of the following Order of the Day which was read to all troops before the attack:

Soldiers of the West Front:

Your great hour has struck. Strong attacking armies are advancing today against the Anglo-Americans. I do not need to say more to you. You all feel it. Everything is at stake. You bear in yourselves the holy duty to give everything and to achieve the superhuman for our fatherland and our fuehrer.

Commander in Chief of the West Front,

Von Rundstedt, Field Marshal.⁶⁷

On the night of Dec. 18-19 the last remnants of two 99th Division outfits came through the Second Division lines, the last organized units to find their way to safety, although small groups and stragglers continued to come out for some days. A German attack at Hofen failed on Dec. 18, and on the following day the Second Division withdrew to the Elsenborn line.⁶⁸

The official U.S. history of this battle credits "accuracy and weight" of the artillery as a major reason the infantry was not completely overrun on Dec. 17-18, although men counted as well as the weight of metal.⁶⁹ German failure to break out on this north shoulder of the Bulge had much impact on the width of the planned assault front. By Dec. 18 the base of the drive had stabilized at a width of 47 airline miles, less than the Germans wanted. The greatest depth of the German drive, reached on the tenth day of the offensive, was about 60 airline miles.⁷⁰

Second Infantry Division troops still clung to Krinkelt-Rocherath on the morning of Dec. 19 but the Germans were getting ready for another push against the twin villages, and a pullout of GIs was scheduled to start in the evening. By late morning, enemy snipers and machine guns were noisy, close to U.S. positions.

Meantime the litter of abandoned U.S. equipment in the vicinity, left over from the retreat of Dec. 17-18, was an issue of immediate interest for both sides. Shortly before noon, German tanks unloaded a few machine gunners from tanks and they blasted away at derelict tanks close to the GI holes. During the day, too, Second Division men destroyed weapons and equipment, German and American, that could not be withdrawn.¹

In the early afternoon, about eight to ten of A Battery's men headed by Captain Bricker returned on the road of the unit's earlier withdrawal to salvage equipment. There were no troops in the area, just puffs of smoke from mortar fire, and pointblank shooting at Krinkelt. Machine guns, mortars and bigger guns were sounding off-- "we couldn't tell which were ours and which were theirs," the captain stated.

A Battery troops took along a half-ton truck, and a couple of trucks with winches, also a jeep with winch to pull out the abandoned equipment.

They managed to yank out halftracks, and some artillery not belonging to the 535th. When a vehicle had been freed from the Belgian mire, it would be sent back, "hell bent for election," Bricker said.

Later the 535th men-- who were working in no-man's land, with no other GIs between themselves and the Elsenborn line-- stacked up some of the American corpses, bodies that had been scattered where they had fallen. These were snowed on in ensuing days.

Artillery fire became so intense during the salvage operations that the captain ordered the salvage crew to leave the area with vehicles and equipment that could be moved immediately. Lt. Joseph Logsdon and Lt. Macy Cohen were working on equipment several hundred yards east when they got the word by runner. Logsdon headed out on foot reconnaissance to Krinkelt, and Lt. Cohen assembled the men, vehicles and equipment.

The only possible route open to save the equipment was to return to Krinkelt, then double back in the next road west to Wirtzfeld. This route was taken and the vehicles and equipment were brought through small arms and artillery fire safely.

Sgt. Lloyd Adamson, who was with the salvage group, said the men were "fairly successful," in getting out vehicles. However, a one-ton trailer which contained radio equipment had to be abandoned again.

Two silver stars were won by A Battery for the group's work. One went to Captain Bricker, for "gallantry in action." According to the citation, he organized a volunteer party to try to recover vehicles and was "forced to work in full view of the enemy and was subjected to observed machine gun and artillery fire." During four and one-half hours while exposed, he personally directed removal of vehicles, giving instructions and helping with winching operations. Hunt also got a silver star for his efforts.²

Five enlisted men and an officer from B Battery returned on a salvage attempt for that unit at 2:30 p.m. The GIs were hauled part of the way, then set out on foot, and crawled on their stomachs for the final distance. Firing of all types was going on at the same time. The B Battery men set fire to as much equipment as possible to prevent the Germans from capturing it and using it against the Americans, Pfc. Creed Wilson said. Lt. John Conroy informed an Associated Press reporter later:

We got out several half tracks but the machine gun fire drove us away. We were operating ahead of what is now the front lines.

The B BATTERY JOURNAL states that equipment recovery was impossible because of heavy artillery fire from both sides falling in the area.³

At Krinkelt-Rocherath, Second Division troops had received a withdrawal order at 1:45 p.m. Dec. 19, to be effective at 5:30 p.m. Some 99th Division infantry that was north of the villages also was to pull back to the new U.S. defenses around Elsenborn. (U.S. troops finally had cleared out of the area by early morning of Dec. 20.)⁴

Shortly after 4 in the afternoon on Dec. 19, 12 ME 109s and bombed and strafed in the 535th area.

The batteries claimed five planes shot down. This was near the tail end of several days of small-scale aerial blitzkrieg which had proved too wasteful for the Germans, and they were soon to settle back to mostly an occasional armed reconnaissance flight.⁵

T/5 Art Allsup of Headquarters and a buddy, unshaven and out of uniform, went into Verviers, a Belgian town in the rear, for supplies, shortly after the breakthrough.

A military policeman asked, "What's going on up there?" and people handed the new arrivals bread and wine.

News blackout had been clamped on the Allied front-- by Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges, the First Army Commander, with the approval of Supreme Headquarters⁶ -- and the German communiques also were deliberately vague about the whereabouts of their leading tank columns. However, the German radio did claim on Dec. 18 that there had been "a speedy collapse of every organized Allied defense," and that Germans were crossing northern Luxembourg on a broad front, also that troops of the Wehrmacht were nearing the Luxembourg-Belgium border.

One noisy night about Dec. 19-20 an enlisted man from one of the batteries, perched on a barracks step at Camp Elsenborn, was saying that German paratroops were being dropped and annihilated. Artillery noises seemed to be all around the Elsenborn positions, and it was not difficult to imagine a trap being closed. We were concerned about the possibility of another breakthrough, and for days did not know what to anticipate next. The constant noises day and night, the unceasing artillery dueling, kept us on edge. Planes swooshed in strafing and the Headquarters men sprawled on the barracks floors, but we did not mind a strafing when a large amount of ack-ack was responding to the attack.

Even the officers, who provided information ordinarily on the current situation, were lacking in details of what was taking place. The 535th men had only the vaguest stories to go on, and had not even heard some of the very incomplete news stories being aired on the radios. Later, an historian who had access to First Army papers of the time wrote that the pendulum swung as sharply to pessimism at this period among the Army's leaders as it had earlier to undue optimism.⁷ To the men at Elsenborn, unaware of specifics on the action immediately ahead of them on the front, the one hopeful omen was the preponderance of American artillery fire over the incoming German shells, although the enemy explosives were numerous.

The Butgenbach-Krinkelt-Elsenborn area provided the first solid, hopeful news of the German drive on Dec. 19, when the Army cleared a story from Wes Gallagher, Associated Press correspondent, stating that the GIs had brought the German attack to a halt on the northern flank, which the story identified vaguely as "south of Monschau." The big offensive was blunted in "a welter of dead tanks and dead men," Gallagher stated. No divisions or other units on the front were identified.

Further south, the situation still was fluid and obscure, the newsman wrote.

Gallagher reported flying bombs still thundering overhead, Belgian refugees peddling one way on bikes, and long lines of guns and tanks heading in the other direction. In this northern corner of the wide battle front where millions of snow-covered evergreens stood "like Christmas trees," the ground was snow pocked and a slight thaw had started a steamy fog rising out of the trees. The entire scene reminded Gallagher of "a subdivision of Dante's Inferno;" out of the fog could be heard the drone of hundreds of planes of unknown nationality.⁸

What was happening during this period, although not known to the 535th at the time, was that the Germans were shifting the weight of their attack slightly west, to the Dom Butgenbach area, to attempt to smash through to the north after failing in the effort to crack the Elsenborn Ridge line from the east. On Dec. 21, during a time of especially heavy German attack, more than 10,000 rounds of U.S. artillery, including shells from the 99th's guns, were fired in this area to support the U.S. defenders. The 26th Infantry regiment of the First Division, which had been hard hit at Hurtgen Forest, was now in "the hot corner" at Dom Butgenbach. By Dec. 20 the First Army had what the official historian described as "a fairly homogeneous and well-constructed front" in the area, with the Second Division on the right of the 99th, and the Ninth Division taking over Monschau-Hofen sector to the north this same day.⁹

Camp Elsenborn and artillery and other positions immediately behind the front lines were prime targets for the German artillery, which poured in many hundreds of shells, keeping GIs on edge,

Concentrated artillery fire was smashing into the A Battery CP area of the 535th at 1 a.m. Dec. 21, and the men moved to an air raid shelter and bomb cellar. Communications had moved to the cellar, and CP was preparing to move from a barracks when a large-caliber shell exploded at the CP at 2 a.m., killing Lt. Robert the first platoon commander, and wounding two enlisted men, destroying a truck and the building and damaging equipment. A's CP had moved to the new position by 3 a.m.¹⁰ On the same day a large railroad gun was landing shells close to a D Battery gun section, and Pvt. Martin was wounded.¹¹

In the late afternoon of Dec. 21 Major Janney informed D Battery that because of the heavy shelling the CP could withdraw to a town a few miles west of Eupen, if it was deemed advisable. He said part of Battalion Headquarters was being pulled out, and only an advanced echelon was being left at the camp. Transfer of some of the administrative personnel was being made to reduce the risk of unnecessary casualties.¹²

Headquarters moved to Sourbrodt from Camp Elsenborn when the 99th Division and Division Artillery moved because the shelling of the camp was too heavy. Part of Headquarters-- a rear echelon-- was moved back to Verviers. The German drive was nearing its peak to the west, and worried townspeople stood on the Verviers sidewalks studying the movement of American traffic. When one of the 535th trucks stopped briefly, a girl rushed out with a pitcher of coffee, and other civilians handed cups to the soldiers. As the vehicles passed along the street, apples were thrown in. Some light tanks rushed through from the direction of Aachen and Eupen headed for the Bulge front, and the people cheered and threw them food.¹³

On Dec. 22, B Battery Headquarters and first platoon pulled out of Camp Elsenborn for a position one mile west of the camp, and headquarters was set up in a forest.¹⁴

On this day the enemy artillery fire into the camp definitely slackened. The Germans finally gave up at Elsenborn after shelling and an attack that broke through in the Butgenbach area for a short time before being curbed. The German Sixth Army had lost more than 100 tanks and thousands of men in three days of attacks in this area. On this last day, the Germans also were bogged down by rain and mud.¹⁵

The night of Dec. 22 was quiet. The weather which had been warm since Dec. 17 turned cold. Snow fell and the ground froze. Dec. 23 was clear and cold and the ground continued to freeze. Artillery kept up a steady barrage, and toward noon numerous U.S. planes began to appear overhead in the 535th area. Frequently the ground at 535th positions would shake from impact of bombs crunching into the enemy salient. Many fighters were busy, and "terrific" air battles were "fought all around us."¹⁶ Pfc. Koerber saw three U.S. bombers "go down in smoke."¹⁷

This time provided the kind of scene described later by Roland Gask, a news correspondent, as “nights of brilliant moonlight and red ack-ack tracers, days of blue skies, gray battle smoke, and silvery fighter planes..." The "Russian high," an eastern high-pressure area that moved in during the night of Dec. 22-23, opened up five days of fine weather which Allied planes put to good use. In the previous three days, fog which had moved from England to the continent had kept the planes from operating.

Some of the aircraft shot up spearheads of the advancing German columns. On Dec. 23, Colonel Peiper, who had led his tanks through Bullingen on the morning of Dec. 17, had to abandon tanks and guns and turn back to the rest of his division with 800 of his men.¹⁸ A German general who called Dec. 24 the Day of the Air Force (Allied) said that when night fell "a glow could be seen stretching right back to the West wall"-- the roads were marked "by lines of flaming vehicles."¹⁹

The First Army troops in this section of the Bulge front were getting somewhat of a "breather" with the ebb in German effort, and a semblance of holiday festivity could be observed in frequently crude surroundings.

On a day about Christmas, there had been some enemy air action over Sourbrodt, and one of our gun crews had shot down a German plane, S/Sgt. Raymond Dixon of C Battery said. Dixon recalled:

Nonetheless, our cook was whipping some chocolate layer cakes to celebrate the season. The cakes turned out fine and were served for dessert that evening. One of our men bit into his piece, let out a few choice words, and spit out a 50-caliber machine gun slug. Glad it had gone in the cake and not in the cook.

Preparing Christmas dinner was no easy task for a D Battery cook, T/5 Myron Meixner.

Turkeys, big 20-pounders, had arrived the night before, frozen solid, not cleaned and still half covered with feathers. Meixner had nothing big enough in which to thaw out the birds. He remembered:

It was one big mess. I called on all the cooks to help clean them. The Germans started shelling, everybody took off but I was so dumb I stayed to clean them so we could have them for Christmas dinner the next day. I was inside the tent and I could hear shrapnel zooming around and the tanks fighting.

Pfc. Koerber jotted down that he had cold turkey for dinner on Christmas. But this was compensated for by the continuing aid from the Air Force:

Our bombers worked over the front lines real good.²⁰

On Christmas day the B Battery CP called down to Pfc. Creed Wilson's gun section on the radio and told the men to come in for a turkey dinner. The men tried several times to crawl toward the CP, which was behind a hill, but the Germans had the place spotted, and fired in 88mm shells when the gun section men appeared out of their holes. Finally the 535th GIs gave up, and settled for hard candy and cookies for their Christmas dinner.

Lt. Elliott of the advance Headquarters group at Sourbrodt recalled:

As I remember it, we finally received mail Christmas night-- boxes and letters. I opened mine by candle light in the stone barracks and what a good feeling it was to have some news from home. Everyone contributed to the community pot the next day as we ate Christmas dinner, officers and men together on the floor of the barracks, with the Jerry artillery chewing away at the other end of the barracks while we ate.

In the rear echelon at the schoolhouse in Verviers, GIs of the 535th had a helping of hash and tincan full of coffee, and everyone was glad to be alive and present to get the holiday fare. Some of the fellows munched on fruitcake, peanuts and candy from Christmas packages which had arrived after Dec. 17, and shared the treats with the rest of the men in the kitchen. T/5 Edgar McGraw provided some melancholy music on the guitar, and some of the group with money put out 450 francs-- about $10-- to send out Henry, the rear echelon's young French friend, to get a bottle of cognac.

On the news front, there seemed to be some encouragement in the radio reports despite still-vague accounts stemming from the official secrecy policy. The relief of Bastogne in another part of the Bulge was not announced until a little later in the month.

The 535th's gunners, whose 40mms and halftracks were set up in the open-- although camouflaged and also aided by snow cover-- dug into the ground and set up housekeeping near the artillery as good as possible, despite the generally cold, miserable conditions,

Pfcs, Creed Wilson and Orval Barkema dug in their machine gun alongside a bombed-out building in Camp Elsenborn,

Wilson used a winch from the front of his truck to haul down rafters and dry boards from the roofs of the German barracks for the fires in the foxholes, This was the only good fuel supply available,

Each hole contained a wood heater "which we had scrounged somewhere." The men attached elbows to the stoves, around half a dozen in the Wilson-Barkema hole. Wilson explained that the quantity of elbows broke the flight of sparks; the "krauts" could not see sparks flying out of the holes. If they saw a spark in the night, they would be likely to zero in on it.

The machine gunners' foxhole was connected with the machine gun pit by a trench, so that they would not have to venture onto the snowy ground above. The two men and other GIs in the area used anything they could obtain for a roof, including boards, waterproof paper and logs. These kept out the snow and provided some other protection.

At D Battery, the hole in which Fat Lee lived from Dec. 19 to the late winter was the best dug-in home which he resided in during the war-- five feet deep, and about nine feet long by nine feet wide. Stove and chimney were made out of artillery shells. On top of the hole the men used logs, then a layer of quite a bit of dirt. Snow added an additional cover.

"Anyway, we thought we would be safe for a while," Lee recalled.

In a report on conditions during the Battle of the Bulge, Capt. Stanley Lowe, battalion surgeon, said the weather was cold and disagreeable and that "the continuous snow and freezing temperature proved to be a hardship to the men on the gun crews, who lived outdoors in tents and foxholes."

The captain observed that small branches proved to be the best flooring or footing for the gun pits. Straw or hay floors were tried but proved unsatisfactory.

Main type of casualties treated during the Battle of the Bulge in the aid station at Sourbrodt were shrapnel wounds caused by enemy artillery, bomb fragments or strafing.

Captain Lowe wrote:

A few frozen feet and occasional trench foot cases were found...

There was a prevalence of impetigo due to the cold weather, causing injury to the men's faces. A paste made of Sulfathiazole tablets and water applied to the affected areas proved to be a successful treatment for the impetigo.²¹

T/5 Meixner froze his feet during the rugged winter, in the Elsenborn area. He elaborated:

At first I thought I had trench foot, but I didn't say anything. I was afraid I would have to leave my outfit and go to the hospital. I had to leave my feet out from under the covers for a week, they burned so bad.

Standing guard could be a frigid assignment during this time, bringing nipped fingers and frost-bitten toes. Pvt. Donald Allen described this kind of duty under the title "Guard (near Camp Elsenborn)"--

Harold Gluth and Wilson were assigned to the "Red Ball" transportation run during the Battle of the Bulge and only returned thereafter for the rest of the period in Belgium to move the 40mms and machine guns for B Battery.

They trucked food and ammunition, mostly the latter, from supply depots as far as 75 to 100 miles away to various places on the front lines. The U.S. Army did not have enough supply trucks and had to take all that could be borrowed for the emergency jobs.

Wilson's truck windshield was broken out, and he was lacking a new one. The 535th man was traveling to the front with a load of flour and was "about to freeze" from the bitter cold streaming in through the front opening when he saw a truck similar to his, temporarily deserted. He stopped, got out with a screwdriver and began removing the windshield. When he was part way through the job, the operator of the vehicle returned in another machine. The new arrival, who outranked the 535th man, was angry, but Wilson managed to calm him down and finally was able to swap a sack of flour for the badly-needed windshield.

Wilson said later:

It was real cold, so cold your face would freeze. I usually took along a bottle of cognac and this helped out.

Wilson always kept a can of food wired under the hood of his truck, near the motor, to keep it warm. If any of the men in the gun section wanted a can of these warmed C-rations, they were required to replace the can with another. This method of warming food cans was customary in the latter days of the Bulge, the truck driver recalled.

One time during the Battle of the Bulge new tires were brought in to replace synthetic tires. Wilson had 10 tires and a spare on his truck, and he had to change all of them in three feet of snow.

On Dec. 26 and 27, P-47s strafed and bombed some 535th positions and the adjoining field artillery, ignoring flares and panels. Casualties were reported by the field artillery, and Sergeant Esparza of D Battery was wounded on Dec. 27. Pfc. Koerber counted eight P-47s and four Typhoons on the second day. He did not know if there was a mistake in the bombing, or if the fliers were German pilots in captured planes.²³ From one to six planes were fired on daily by the 535th men, from Dec. 24 through Dec. 27, and several were knocked down.²⁴

For five days the weather had favored the U.S. Dec. 28 was cloudy and overcast, and on Dec. 29 Arctic air poured in from the Scandinavian area with heavy snow, blizzards and much-murkier visibility. On the last day of the year an airplane dove out of the clouds, dropped a heavy bomb on a section of an artillery unit near the 535th, killing one man and injuring three.²⁵

December ended with the most casualties for the 535th so far in any one month: seven enlisted men missing in action; an officer and six enlisted men killed in action; one officer, a warrant officer and 27 enlisted men lightly wounded, and 10 enlisted men seriously wounded.²⁶

For the men at the 40mms, halftracks and dug-in individual machine guns, New Year's Day 1945 opened as just another day on watch at their weapons. Pfc. Doyle Butler, on guard at a water-cooled machine gun from 4 to 8 that morning, recalled that the morning was clear and cold and that just after daylight two German cargo planes flew almost directly overhead but were so high he could not shoot at them, He watched until they were near the Spa area and let out parachutes, which were lighted by the morning sun, The 90mm gunners began firing and Butler saw one German plane smoking, following a hit,

After Butler got off shift he and some buddies loaded on a truck which had come by to take them to breakfast, about half a mile away-- the procedure was for part of the men to eat while the others stayed on guard.

Fat Lee had remained with the halftrack. He was there when word came in from an outpost, he recalled, that a few Jerry planes were coming, followed right away by a report that "beaucoup" ME 109s were zooming in at tree-top level toward the ack-ack positions.

The truck carrying Butler and about half a dozen other GIs had rolled only one-quarter of a mile from the 40mm gun and was about 40 yards from the halftrack "when right in front of us there was a swarm of German planes diving right on top of us, strafing and bombing, it seemed every place we looked,” Butler wrote.

He recalled:

We all jumped and made a run for Lee's gun hole. The ground was frozen solid with just a skiff of snow, and there were bullets bouncing all around us. I shall never know how we ever got to the hole but we all made it.

Butler had just dived in near the halftrack when he looked and saw a plane coming directly for the position, strafing. The ME 109 was so low that Lee, the gunner, was momentarily frozen with indecision; he was afraid that if he hit the plane it would fall on the halftrack.

"Fat Lee, go ahead, fire!'' someone hollered. At the same time the pilot must have seen and realized his danger, Lee believes, for he was being tracked with the machine guns. He turned to Lee's left and veered a bit lower, "hoping, I believe, I wouldn't fire on him, as we had men on the far hill," Lee said. The moment the plane turned Lee fired.

T/5 Marshall Botbyl, who also had fled from the truck to the halftrack, remembered later that the ME 109 "'took a lot of lead." He stated:

It went straight ahead and ran into a big hill and blew up-- I will never forget it-- like a bomb going off. The fellow never had a chance to get out.

Butler, who saw smoke come out of the plane before the crash, remembered:

If Lee had not got him when he did, I'm sure he would have got a direct hit with a bomb.

More German planes were being knocked out of the winter sky at about that same time-- "it seemed as if every direction we looked there was a burning plane," Butler said, and added:

They came in right over the tree tops and you couldn't see or hear them until they were right on top of you.

Botbyl said the D Battery position was dug in on a hill just below the crest, and ahead of the hill were some woods, so the 535th guns were obscured from the Germans.²⁷

Two rockets from one attacking plane smashed into the ground 60 yards from an A Battery halftrack. B Battery reported 10 strafing ME 109s and FW 190s in the skies, while D Battery officially listed only "a great number of planes." Eleven of the enemy planes were reported gunned down, but there apparently was some overlap in the claims.²⁸

The action involving the 535th was only part of a mass effort by the Luftwaffe. German planes including a few jets attacked in groups of generally 50 to 75 along the 800-mile

Western front in what was termed the greatest offensive by the Luftwaffe since its heyday in 1940-41. At least 800 planes were used by the Germans, and by observing rigid radio silence and approaching at such a low level, "a high degree of surprise was obtained," according to Twelfth Army Group. However, efficient AAA Intelligence service system, especially visual observers, alerted defenses along the line, and other American ack-ack units as well as the 535th had "a field day." The attacking formations were split up but roared on with strafing and bombing attacks against airfields and secondary targets. Some of the planes used were U.S. craft captured in the Battle of the Bulge, repainted with German markings. The raiders had to fight their way back after penetrating to Brussels area, and dogfights swirled in the skies above Belgium, the Netherlands and France.

Some of the raiders were reported at Antwerp and the mouth of the Scheldt too.

Twelfth Army Group reported that the anti-aircraft destroyed 394 of the raiders and probably destroyed 112 more. This was "a staggering blow to the morale and confidence" of the Luftwaffe, according to the Army Group. The Germans never conducted a raid on anything like that scale again. In the main remaining action facing the 535th, at Remagen, single-plane raids were the rule. Adolf Galland, General of the Luftwaffe's Fighter Army, termed the Jan. 1 flight the conclusion of the tragic Ardennes chapter in which the Luftwaffe received "its death blow."²⁹

Snow continued to cover the ground all of the time during early January. The weather, as usual, was cold. Medics of the 535th, living in the combination cafe and butcher shop at Sourbrodt-- they did not move from there until Feb. 12-- watched fighter-bombers blast at German positions not far away.³⁰

The forward echelon of Headquarters remained quartered at Sourbrodt.

"The time we spent at Sourbrodt seems like a dream," Lieutenant Elliott said. He went to Corps headquarters each morning to get the latest intelligence information, and "that was the coldest riding I have ever done, bar none. I really have a soft spot for the engineers who kept that road open."³¹

Buzzbombs continued to skim over the area periodically, sometimes in considerable numbers. Some of these probably were destined for Liege, where up to 40 of the robot ships were falling on some days.³²

Despite snow flurries and sleeting rain the First Army launched its attack on the north shoulder of the Bulge on Jan. 3. The drive was hampered by terrible weather, in the middle of the northern flank, west of the 99th's sector. Five days after the drive kicked off, Hitler ordered withdrawal to the line Bastogne-Echternach.³³

On Jan. 15 the weather was bright and sunshiny for the first time since the start of the drive, although bitter cold. Great fleets of fighter bombers streaked the blue sky above the Ardennes with white vapor trails, and fighters swooped to bomb and machine gun any Germans seen on the icy roads, as well as tanks and artillery positions. The following day the First and Third armies linked up at Houffalize, and U.S. troops were reported only six miles from St. Vith. The biggest part of the "bulge" had been eliminated.³⁴

Weather continued to be a major topic in the 535th sector, as elsewhere on the U.S. front. A couple of entries from Pfc. Koerber's diary:

By Jan. 24 the "Bulge" had been flattened out so much that lines of advancing troops south of the 99th Division and 535th areas were almost even with the north front.³⁵

The 99th Division, cooperating with the 9th, kicked off a drive on the morning of Jan. 30 in biting winds, cold and snow, and by Feb. 1 had cleared its allotted sector in the Monschau area. On Jan. 30 the Second Division had chased Germans out of Wirtzfeld and was fighting in Rocherath and Krinkelt. The First Division had occupied Murringen and Hunningen and cleared Honsfeld. Resistance to the new U.S. attack was reported light, and the advancing troops were running up against snowstorms and rain.³⁶

The defenders against the First Army troops were reported to be mauled remnants of units that had been falling back toward Germany since the new attack had started in the area Jan. 28, also "alarm companies" of noncombatants scraped together for defense. As the U.S. troops reached the dragon's teeth obstacles of the Siegfried line they encountered increasing resistance, according to a Feb. 4 communique.³⁷

On Feb. 2 the 99th Division was attached to the XVIII Airborne Corps. Some of the 99th's troops were committed on Feb. 3-4, the rest began moving Feb. 4 into an area already too familiar, the section of the big Dec. 17 breakthrough. The Division relieved front-line units of the XVIII Corps on Feb. 5. As part of its protection job, the 535th convoyed with the division. B Battery moved to Rocherath on Feb. 3, traveling through battered and smashed Bullingen and Krinkelt enroute. A Battery rolled out to Hunningen on Feb. 4, and D Battery headed for Krinkelt on the same day. CP of the 535th moved into Bullingen again on Feb. 4 for a week's stay, until the 99th was relieved and put in reserve.³⁸

The area around Krinkelt was described by the D BATTERY JOURNAL writer as "a terrible mess." He also noted:

There were many dead soldiers both Germans and Americans found still laying in the snow where they had been since the fight. As the weather had turned quite warm, the snow was melting and the streets were covered with mud. All in all, the town presented a very dismal picture.

Pfc. Koerber also commented on the German and American corpses "all over the place" and equipment shot up. The town had been leveled by shells and bombs, he noted.

"Sickening," T/5 Botbyl remarked of the numerous bodies still scattered about.

Meixner, also of D Battery, recalled that some cows were found where they had been butchered in Krinkelt:

The meat was still hanging and they had been grinding meat for hamburger. The Germans left it all, they had to get out of there so fast.

On Feb. 5, four halftracks under Lieutenant MacBeth left for new positions in the outer defenses of the Siegfried line. The area was heavily mined, and a thorough minesweeping job had to be carried out. The 40mm guns could not be emplaced because of heavy woods in the area where the guns were supposed to be dug in. On Feb. 7, B Battery second platoon fire units moved to new positions in the Siegfried line.³⁹

Capt. George Dickerson of B Battery received the bronze star medal this same day for heroic achievement during the breakthrough Dec. 17 at Krinkelt.

B Battery left positions near Rocherath on Feb. 10 and convoyed to Amel near St. Vith. The second platoon still was engaged in ack-ack defense of the 99th's artillery, but the first platoon fire units were getting a semi-rest. A Battery's first platoon moved into Amel Feb. 11, with the 371st Field Artillery bivouac. Second platoon was relieved the following day by 467th AAA (SP) Battalion. On Feb. 12 D Battery departed from Krinkelt for Amel, where the men were to get a rest and get equipment in shape.⁴⁰

A Battery moved to Montenau on Feb. 13, and the second platoon was dispersed for bivouac and maintenance. CP of the battalion moved to Mirfield, Belgium, on Feb. 14.⁴¹

In the rear echelon at Verviers on Feb. 18, a slight rain was falling in the evening, and at the school yard gate the 535th soldiers could hear gutter water trickle through a grate. The weather had been warm and clear most of the week, and planes had been droning back and forth through the skies. Heavy bomber formations were visible high in the sky-- the planes were tiny and silvery-appearing, a pretty sight.

Negroes across the street had been washing their ambulances and repainting the red crosses on them. In Verviers, the civilians did not seem to draw the racial line as much as people in the U.S., and you would often see the colored fellows on the sidewalks talking with white girls, holding their hands and stroking their hair.

On the radio, the rear echelon 535th troops listened to the German propagandists, still trying to split the Allied countries. One German broadcaster, in a program beamed at English civilians, said that a Russian newspaperman, a Jew, had written that the "Tommies'" excuse for not advancing was the snow and cold, but the way to keep warm was for them to get moving. The propagandist asserted in an indignant voice, that was "a fine thing" for "this unwholesome Jewish scribbler" to write, after all the sacrifices in blood and materiel the English had made during the war. The Germans used that item often. They stressed the woeful economic and political situation in liberated countries and blamed it all, naturally, on the "Bolsheviks" and "Anglo-Americans." On

Feb. 17, they reported that 30,000 cats had disappeared in Paris, and that they brought $6 apiece.

But time was getting short for the propagandists, as the Allied troops on the Western front prepared for the final drives, and the Russians continued to gain.

The 99th Division and its attached troops were among the units getting a place for the kick-off of the new campaign.

On Feb. 13 the 99th had been relieved by the 69th Division on its front, had assembled in the Waimes-Heppenbach-Born area, and spent a short time in troop rehabilitation, equipment maintenance, clearing of mine fields and repairing roads. This lasted only about a week before the division was moved to Aubel-- between Liege and Aachen-- to be placed in First Army reserve. When the division reached Aubel it was released to the VII Corps for the drive to the Rhine.⁴²

B Battery of the 535th left Amel on Feb. 20 and arrived in Plombiers for a rest period. Showers, movies and passes were available to the men. A Battery had pulled out of Montenau on Feb. 19 and traveled to Hombourg, where some guns went into position and other sections got time out for maintenance and rest. B Battery left Amel by truck on Feb. 20 for Montzen where all of the men were quartered in houses and given an opportunity to clean up and get their equipment in top condition. Passes also were given during this time in the batteries and inspections were held, all in late February.⁴³

(Hombourg and Montzen are a short distance back of the Belgian-German border.)

On Feb. 25 the 535th was relieved from attachment to V Corps and attached to VII Corps.⁴⁴

B Battery left Plombiers, Belgium, on Feb. 27 and reached Stolberg, Germany, where fire units were set up in defensive positions for the night. Next day the battery headed for Elsdorf. D Battery left on March 1 from Montzen to Elsdorf, and on March 2 A Battery rolled out from Hombourg for Desdorf, Germany.⁴⁵

"We have come now to the last and final round," General Montgomery predicted as the First and Ninth Armies kicked off in the anticipated big push across the Roer River in late February. On Feb. 24, the day following the start of the offensive, Germany's Fuehrer called on all in the Reich to fight to the last breath. Germany, he said, had taken so terrible a beating that "there is no greater terror in store for us."¹

But more than words would be needed now to stop the weight of American equipment and manpower. By Feb. 25 long lines of vehicles, big guns and other equipment were rolling over Roer River bridges in what was described as one of the First Army's greatest drives.²

Joining in the new push, the 535th moved out to Elsdorf on the Cologne plain from Feb. 28 through March 2, in separate march units.³

Trucks, jeeps, weapons carriers, quarter-ton vehicles, guns, halftracks moved out on the roads, and under the gray tarps we sat as usual, with our rifles, canteens, piled duffel bags and few other belongings, leaving behind the gray winter scenes of the Ardennes. A gloomy forest near the border shadowed the 535th's long convoys. Eastward, a spray of red explosives in the sky testified to the continuing but uneven clash of opposing armies. Many of the Battalion's vehicles rolling now into Germany to join the rest of the advancing First Army forces had splashed up out of the water onto Utah Beach; others were new, replacements for materiel shot up and burned by the attacking tanks in the Ardennes or mired on retreat roads. The men of the 535th themselves, in mostly subtle ways, were changed GIs from those who had convoyed out of Liege in late November to the Belgian border country, Our outlook as of the first of March had been conditioned and colored by the winter of rugged cold, of American defeat and casualties, a considerable distance from the easy victory parades and hand-slapping French welcomes of late August, But something inexorable and unstoppable was in transit now, as the 535th moved onward in a stepped-up campaign; the last phase, definitely, of the war on the Western front was opening up, the first 25 miles across the bor« oy we didn't see a civilian, only des lages. From smashed Aachen we convoyed on times as large as St. Lo, and about as flat mdy battle center. Many city blocks were piles ble, with an occasional piece of wall standing, and wrecka of all sorts, such as a bathtub perched on end, was visibl

What the Air Force hadn't smashed, the artillery had finished off. The final pockets of resistance had been announced on Feb. 27 as having been cleared up. In Duren the wind had been drying the ground and there was no snow as we passed through.⁴

Out in the country again a small cluster of Germans stood watching some distance from the highway, gaping at the long columns of vehicles and troops moving up. What could they be thinking? Any American troops they had seen earlier were beaten, helmetless, weaponless, probably whiskered, maybe muddy and bedraggled. Now they were seeing a sizable part of the arsenal of a world power, from the factories of Detroit and other North American cities, hauled across several thousand miles of water, finally landed on the continent of Europe and now moving deeper into Germany-- guns by the hundred, many thousands of helmeted troops, great and small vehicles, convoys rolling day after day toward the last great natural barrier, the Rhine River.

The 535th's CP on March 1 was established at Elsdorf, slightly less than 25 miles from Aachen and less than 20 miles from the Rhine, directly west of Cologne.

On the night of March 1-2 the 535th's gunners got some shooting when the Luftwaffe took to the skies in what Harold Denny, a news correspondent, called non-stop bombing raids and reconnoitering thrusts over the First Army's forward areas. The Germans, he stated, apparently "scraped together everything they could spare from this front from obsolescent fighters, which can venture out only at night, to the latest jet-propelled aircraft." This was the greatest air activity Since the Ardennes and caused "enormous uproar' but resulted in relatively little damage. Fighters, most of them oldStyle, roamed the sky in wave on wave, lighted up the ground with parachute flares and dropped bombs. The "thumps and barks" of the ack-ack guns were mingled with the rumble of the German bombs, while "the sky flashed and twinkled with tracers and exploding shells.'' Main targets of the raiders ate to be the bridges that engineers had spanned across ie Roer River, Erft Canal and tributaries. Tanks had rumacross the Erft on a captured bridge on Feb. 28. During air raids, an estimated 150 planes were buzzing throu skies in one restricted portion of the front, ack-ack said. Some were shot down.⁵ In the 535th's are the aircraft fired on were the fast-skimming and dive bombing and strafing were reported. A jeep trailer was flipped over and a jeep damaged at D Battery, and on March 2 two men of the same unit were wounded by 20mm shrapnel. Captain Standley and Cliff Grasman of D Battery, who were standing guard at 2 a.m., ducked into a German pillbox, and bombs fell all around them. Moving up on convoy to Elsdorf March 2, A Battery men fired on and drove off an attacking jet.⁶

Pvt. Donald Allen recalled Elsdorf in a poem titled "Bombing:"

On March 2 the 99th Infantry Division took the offensive, moving toward Koln and crossing the Erft Canal near Glesch.⁸ Ninth Army, moving east on north side of First Army, reached the Rhine near Dusseldorf on March 2.⁹ The broken remnants of three German armies were reported fleeing across the Rhine on March 3, pursued by the newly-linked U.S. Ninth and Canadian First armies. Germans stated that U.S. shells were exploding in Cologne, and artillery fire was so intense in the approaches that "whole houses collapsed without having been hit."¹⁰

Moving ahead with First Army and the 99th, the 535th established its Battalion CP at Neurath on March 4 and moved to Neukirchen for a headquarters on March 6.¹¹

Villages now were in good condition, swept up quickly in the American drive. Neukirchen consisted of a church, several orchards and a few rows of brick houses at the junction of three muddy roads. From a second-story window a GI could see a couple of soldiers walking past with rifles slung, a civilian or jeep passing, a civilian sniping a GI cigarette butt from the mud near the front door.

The Headquarters mess hall formerly had been used as a propaganda and sharpshooting club, and on the wall were framed patriotic exhortations and a poster showing with maps and graphs the "unfairness" of England having an empire and Germany having none. We found bazookas and plenty of rifle ammunition there, and many targets of little cardboard American soldiers. But the club members may have changed some of their ideas about fighting when Sherman tanks and American infantry poured into the village. The residents were docile; some acted friendly but most were cool,

At night no people or traffic were moving, and there were only the uneasy noises of war. We could hear the rumble of American artillery and the occasional bam of a gun close by, and once an air raid siren wailing an alert in an enemy city.

The siren was a reminder of the continuing resistance up ahead, and the diehard symbol that concerned us most was the Rhine River. For months we had been dreading the crossing of that famed stream. The Germans had put up a terrific struggle at rivers that were considerably more minor. The STARS AND STRIPES had caught the mood in predicting that the Rhine would not be "an easy nut to crack."' We were in a country "100 per cent hostile," nearing a river valley where terrain offered good defensive opportunities. Among the allied armies "a tenseness like that which preceded D-Day is being felt," the newspaper reported.¹²

We were not sure what to expect from the people. On March 5, Ist Sgt. Eugene Savage and other A Battery enlisted men searched homes in Widdeshoven, found and destroyed six small-caliber rifles. But some Germans apparently were losing heart. On the previous day Captain Bricker, Lt.

Frank Furda and Lt. Macy Cohen, in a reconnaissance to Gill, had captured 25 enemy soldiers.¹³

On March 5 U.S. troops moved into Cologne against sporadic resistance, and on the following day the capture by the First Army of the fourth largest city in the Third Reich was announced. All five bridges across the Rhine at Cologne had been blown up, and GIs found the city, which had a pre-war population of 780,000, practically lifeless.¹⁴

At Neukirchen, Battalion CP heard that a couple of infantry companies had crossed the Rhine River on a bridge that hadn't been blown up by the retreating Germans. Later reports stated that more infantry had crossed.¹⁵

The span was the Ludendorff bridge, taken intact March 7 at-Remagen by Ninth Armored Division, although one small charge under the bridge had detonated. The bridge had been prepared for demolition and there was a small explosion in the steel structure as armored infantrymen crossed through German ack-ack fire. American engineers cut all demolitions they could find. The capture was announced on March 8 but the location wasn't disclosed by Supreme Headquarters; however, a Reuters dispatch the same day identified the bridge as located at Remagen. General Eisenhower ordered that five divisions be pushed across the Rhine at Remagen at once.¹⁶

The 99th Division was transferred from VII Corps to III Corps and by March 10 all units of the 99th had moved to a new concentration area, at Stadt-Mechenheim, 10 miles northeast of Remagen.¹⁷ As the 535th and other troops of First Army streamed south to take advantage of the breakthrough onto the east bank, we found white flags hanging from most houses along the way. In the village of Luftelberg, where the 535th set up its CP on March 9,¹⁸ a white flag was hung from a large pole. The residents were slow in moving out of one of the houses wanted by Headquarters personnel, and Major Janney got angry, told them through Sgt. Arnold Fritz, our interpreter, to move right now and make no mistake. The Germans hustled with wagons, back and forth, moving out what they needed for a few days' housekeeping. In another house the women cried, said they weren't Nazis, and not to kaput their houses. They moved into a shed in the rear.

We were starting our policy, which was to continue in Germany, of using German houses for our living quarters, and one of the most interesting techniques in obtaining these was developed by Capt. George Dickerson of Battery B, and discovered eventually by Major Burnham. The major wrote:

As we moved on through Germany it became quite apparent that Dickerson always had the best house in town. Eventually I discovered his method of operation. As Dickerson entered each new German town, he, with a Deutsch-speaking sergeant, stopped in front of the first decent-looking house. They banged on the door until someone answered. Then the sergeant would command, "Raus, the captain wants your house." Always the reply was a crying and sobbing, "Mama kranken, baby's sick, grandpa dying, Mama pregnant," etc., etc. The sergeant would break in on the weeping and wailing and say, "You tell us where the gauleiter lives and you can stay." The gauleiter of course always lived in the best house in town.

But housing considerations remained secondary to the problem of ending German resistance.

Infantry of the 99th Division began crossing into the new bridgehead on March 11, a somewhat-nightmarish operation on the "spidery steel framework" with its squat brownish towers. "Underfoot were but a few unsteady planks and rails; overhead nothing. Doughs felt naked in the sights of enemy guns," a 99th historian wrote. Shells, as many as one a minute, were hitting at the bridge. Instead of foxhole religion, the 99th men got "bridgehead religion" during the crossing.¹⁹ A news correspondent who crossed the same day at the enforced speed of 5 miles an hour vouched that there was "nothing like the naked feeling you get when you realize just where you are," with German shells whistling in and U.S. projectiles passing overhead, "almost as terrifying." Numerous German 155mm and 210mm shells were shrilling in constantly, in an effort to destroy the captured span. This was in addition to "suicide" air attacks on the bridge. German columns also were reported converging on the new bridgehead, but men, guns, tanks and supplies of First Army poured across to reinforce the troops on the east bank. Remagen at this time was known as the Shooting Gallery and also was labeled the hottest spot in Europe.²⁰

On March 11 the 535th convoyed on toward Remagen, and Battalion CP moved into a house at Lohndorf, while civilians moved into a cellar.

German artillery fire was heavy on the bridgehead across the river in the morning but fell off later as U.S. shells smashed the German gun positions.²¹ Near Lohndorf, the 99th's artillery was set up in open fields. Stark and grim against the Rhine fields in the afternoon and dusk, the guns from the frozen winter snows of the Ardennes, guns that had torn holes in Sepp Dietrich's panzer army on the border of Belgium squatted with thick snouts angled upward and toward the far side of the Rhine, while big bonfires blazed alongside, and hammered shells onto the opposite bank, on enemy positions facing the bridgehead. Bridging equipment, tanks and other First Army materiel were sitting on the road waiting to cross. All that day troops had been pouring across a temporary bridge which Engineers had built to supplement the Ludendorff bridge. There had been a considerable increase in the number of men and amount of equipment moving across the big river.²²

The 535th had been detached from the 99th Division and was sent across the Rhine for the bridge protection mission, so the anti-aircraft was across before the field artillery. Colonel Francis maintained liaison with the artillery, however, because he knew the Battalion would be re-attached for the breakout.²³

Specific target being protected was the pontoon bridge between Linz and Kripp, and the line batteries began moving over on March 11.²⁴

B BATTERY JOURNAL reported that several hours were required for the unit to cross into the bridgehead, and the columns were strafed several times by enemy aircraft. One truck from another organization was hit by artillery fire and set ablaze. B's CP was located in a railroad station for the night.²⁵

Pfc. Creed Wilson recalled that his gun section from B moved across the captured bridge in the night, with Sgt. Johnnie Butts walking in front of the truck as it inched over two long lines of planks spread over the bed of the bridge. The sergeant kept his flashlight on the tires and planks to make sure the truck didn't slip over one way or another, and gave directions to Wilson in the cab-- Wilson was peering out the window in the darkness trying to see the planks. Other men in the gun section preferred hiking over, to reach the far bank as soon as possible. The shrill of incoming 88 shells could be heard above and below the span periodically. As the trucks, bumper to bumper, edged along in the darkness on the wobbly planks, Wilson was sure it was "a pretty shaky" situation. The truck finally reached the east bank, and not far from the bridge the gun section crew unhooked its 40mm and sandbagged the position, also digging in as much as possible. If the ground was too hard in any places picked for a gun site, the men had to rely on sandbags for protection.

Captain W.E. Hughes and officers of C Battery's first and second platoons crossed the pontoon bridge in Hughes’ jeep to select gun sites. The platoon officers returned the same day, March 11, to bring the battery across. The captain remembered:

They crossed the Remagen bridge at night. Each vehicle used a man to crawl in front to feel for holes in the planking. Since they were under constant artillery fire it was necessary to lay new planking, even between vehicles as the Jerries had the bridge zeroed in. No casualties.

C Battery CP was established in Linz.

D Battery reached Linz at 7 p.m. Enroute the column was raided twice by planes, and two of the craft were reported shot down.²⁶

Shells were landing around the bridge at the time that a four-man advance party of A Battery headed by Captain Bricker crossed the Rhine, after a long wait. On the bridgehead, the party turned right into Linz and took over two large houses facing the Rhine. Snipers still were operating on hills behind the houses and after Captain Bricker had gone back to lead in the rest of the battery, Sgt. Lloyd Adamson and a GI named Joe had to take cover in the houses because of the fire. Adamson remarked:

We sure had an unusual feeling there-- all alone on the wrong side of the river. We were sure glad to see the rest of the outfit arrive and get set up.

For Pfc. Edward Barrett of A Battery, crossing through the whizzing shells, "it seemed as though it would take us ages to get to the other side." But at 9 p.m. the unit arrived on the far shore.²⁷

From the 535th Battalion CP at Lohndorf on the west side of the Rhine, GIs looked out of an upper window on the night of March 11 and saw shells lighting like sparks in the area of the bridge.

On March 12 there was some shelling but none of the explosives landed in the vicinity of Headquarters and Medical Detachment convoy slowly crossing the pontoon bridge two miles upstream from Remagen bridge, observing the speed limit of five miles an hour. Looking back on the western bank of the Rhine was a considerable relief; one more barrier had been crossed. Completion of the crossing for the 535th gave Lt. Col. Francis one more claim of a "first'' for the outfit. He asserted that the 535th was the first anti-aircraft battalion completely across the Rhine, as well as the first fully ashore in Normandy and the first U.S. unit to shoot down a German jet-- with a quad .50 at Liege.

From the German standpoint, the Rhine had been considered a stronger obstacle against invasion than the Hindenburg or Siegfried line, and although our bridgehead still was small it represented the first crossing of the Rhine by an invading army in 140 years, since 1805 when Napoleon crossed from the Channel coast to rout the Austrians at Ulm. Unusual measures were being taken to guard the bridges against destruction. The anti-aircraft which was being assembled was half again as dense as had been used on the Normandy beachhead. Booms had been established on the upstream side to guard against submersibles and radio-controlled mines, barrage balloons had been hoisted on each side of the river, depth charges were dropped in the river to protect against frogmen slipping through, and patrols on the bridge guarded against possible saboteurs who might work their way into the American columns. One of the antiaircraft incidental missions at Remagen was to shoot any floating objects coming down the Rhine River toward the bridge.²⁸

On March 12, the same day that Battalion CP was established in houses at Linz, the bridgehead was reported to have been increased to a depth of four miles.²⁹ The 535th's guns already were getting a workout. German planes attacked during the afternoon, attempting to knock out the bridges over which First Army was strengthening the bridgehead. Eighteen FW 190s and ME 109s roared in singly at about 1,000 feet in low overcast, and when they were fired on they unloaded their bombs and climbed into the clouds. The 535th claimed five planes destroyed and three damaged.³⁰ Another account listed a total of 35 planes over the bridgehead during the day-- some of these weren't in the 535th's sector. Ground fire destroyed 12 and possibly 16 of the craft. As an example of the expenditure of ammunition at Remagen, A Battery alone expended 956 rounds of 40mm and 18,441 rounds of 50-caliber ammunition on this day.³¹

Under date of March 12, Andy Rooney of the STARS AND STRIPES wrote the following account of the action involving the 535th and other ack-ack units;

...From a ringside seat on the Rhine banks you can sit all day and watch slow-cruising, ancient JU 87s, the original dive bombers, move in and out of the cloud banks over the bridgehead at 15 to 20-minute intervals. Occasionally a darting ME 109 or FW 190 rips out of the clouds and mist and, sweeping the length of the bridge, drops a stick of bombs.

When a German plane (they almost always come in singly) shows, first some alert machine-gunner spots it and lets loose with a stream of red tracers. Following the first man's aim, the hundreds of other men standing impatiently behind their guns spot the Jerry and within five seconds the air over the bridge is filled with neon crosses as thousands of tracers light up the dirty weather.

The fighter-bomber Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs usually come in lower than the Stukas... The fast planes come in low over the hills and swoop over the bridge. As soon as they have dropped their bombs they usually dive again behind the hills on the far side to get below the horizon of ack-ack gunners' visibility...³²

On March 13 the Germans were reported still fighting stubbornly to the east but the First Army now held a bridgehead five miles deep and about 12 miles long. The Luftwaffe sent in at least 60 planes in raids.³³

Raids in the 535th's area were all by single planes except for one pairing of ME 109s, which were blasted apart by Battery D fire. One bomb hit the west approach of Remagen bridge but there was no other damage. The 535th claimed nine of the raiders shot down and one damaged.³⁴ Supreme Headquarters reported that First Army ack-ack in the bridgehead knocked down 13 planes and probably destroyed nine more. The Air Force also destroyed some of the enemy planes in the air, and bombed airfields.³⁵

Three of the March 13 raiders reported by the 535th were ME 262s, foreshadowing a stepped-up effort by these fast ships on March 14. The ME 262, called the "Queen of the Skies," was the world's first turbo-jet aircraft, and had been seen rarely over the 535th's areas. Only about 2,000 of these machines were ever completed, and 1,000 of them stood idle at their action stations toward the end of the war because of lack of fuel.³⁶

Sergeant Adamson of A Battery remembered the first ME 262 he saw over the bridgehead:

I recall being on the railroad tracks between the river and the houses when this first jet came down the river and dropped a bomb at the pontoon bridge. It

wasn't far enough away to suit me but I couldn't get any further. I watched as the plane released the bomb

SO and watched, from my stomach, as the bomb took ages to strike. I had my hands over the back of my neck and I was pushed into the cinders of the railroad track as far as I could go, as the bomb struck the water just above the pontoon bridge. Nothing happened-- the bomb sank to the bottom.

A news correspondent on the bridgehead about this time saw a ME 262 sweep in low toward the bridge but waver when four U.S. P38s zoomed in sidewise. The German craft turned and staggered from view behind the hills. John Terrell, the correspondent, also saw a long line of German prisoners caught on an open road during one air fight. Ack-ack fragments showered down near the captives. Although their GI guards were out of sight, they didn't run for cover, fearing they would be shot.³⁷

Another reporter, who had been at Anzio, termed both bridgeheads hell on earth but said there is "rather more stuff-- hot, jagged lumps of metal-- flying about at Remagen." He thought there was sometimes more danger from bursting ack-ack shells than from the German bombs.³⁸

On March 14 German aircraft continued efforts to destroy the bridges, coming in at intervals of about a quarter of an hour.³⁹ Most of the planes reported by the 535th were the ME 262 jets. Shortly before 3:30 p.m., the whistle of a bomb was heard, then an explosion, and glass shattered numerous windows in Linz. Smoke poured up, and the Medics and other GIs headed through the town to the blast scene. Exploding near a gun crew, the bomb killed four of the 535th's enlisted men-- Pfc. Floyd Weeks, Pfc. Elmer Kaszuba, Pfc. Adolfo Valasquez and Cpl. Clare Ball. Pfc. Thomas Van Ham died later of wounds. D BATTERY JOURNAL reported seven also wounded. One truck and a machine gun were destroyed, and a truck and 40mm gun were damaged. Six of the raiding planes roared in within only slightly more than half an hour after the blast, while 535th Medics still were working.⁴⁰ A KANSAS CITY STAR story described the scene:

Despite exploding aerial bombs, with trucks blazing exploding anti-aircraft shells, five lone Medics worked in the flaming inferno and pulled an injured man to safety...

Bombs landed within 50 feet of a 40mm gun and within 20 feet of a .50-cal machine gun position. Many casualties were sustained and three trucks piled full of ammunition were hit. As flames swept high into the sky, Capt. S.T. Lowe, Battle Creek, Mich., spotted the burning position and ran to save the stricken men. At the same time S/Sgt. John N. Bergstrom of 135 1/2 East 70th St., Los Angeles, Calif., ran to help the captain. Meanwhile more planes were coming over and the ammunition was getting very hot.

Tracers and bombs were in great confusion over the pair when Pfc. Donald S. Bradbury of 309 E. Second St., Sedalia, Mo., joined the race to save lives. The ammunition was beginning to explode and the din of confusion was terrific when the bombers came back again.

Sgt. Ross Jenson, Sandy, Utah, joined the trio. Several men had been rescued by Lowe, Bergstrom and Bradbury. Jenson lifted one wounded man and started to carry him to a nearby doorway when S/Sgt. Ola R. Parsley of 1201 East Eighth St., Pueblo, Colo. met Jenson on the way to the door.

"Here, go back after another one, I can give him first aid while you help the others out," Parsley yelled to Jenson amidst the din of exploding bombs and ammunition.

Sergeant Jenson went back and was carrying another man to safety when more bombers came over. One landed so close that when Parsley was working with the man in the doorway, he was knocked down and his hand cut. Not to be outdone by the planes, Parsley picked up the wounded man and carried him to the basement where he received full treatment.

Again and again these five men worked and all the wounded were carried to the basement through the close teamwork of the five Medics. Lowe, Bergstrom, Bradbury, Jenson and Parsley worked in the hellish inferno.

All of the wounded were finally freed and treated in the basement.

Medical Detachment transportation was not available and the gun crew's truck was blazing, so passing Jeeps had to be commandeered to take the wounded to a clearing station in Linz.⁴¹

The gun section that had been wiped out had been scheduled for a move. Battery officers already were on a reconnaissance for a new position, and the 535th men wouldn't have been at the fatal site about an hour or so later.⁴²

For their work with the wounded men, the five Medics all received the bronze star award at a ceremony in Germany.⁴³

Another bomb on March 14 exploded near D Battery's No. 7 halftrack, knocking out one man and shaking other members of the crew. Four A Battery men also were wounded in bombings during the day, one seriously; one had been wounded the previous day. A total of 98 planes were reported involved in 57 raids on March 14, and one observer said the noise during the raids was like "the skies were being ripped apart by the clanging open and shut of the gates of hell."⁴⁴

On March 14, action had given some of the 535th men a more cautious attitude toward the German planes, especially the jets. Headquarters enlisted men who had been out in the street previously cheering when Battalion guns opened up on the Luftwaffe rushed for the cellar on March 15 when an excited report came over the AAAIS radio: "Flash flash -- one aircraft northwest one thousand feet."

During a day in which the heavy overcast had cleared away by noontime, the gunners claimed one ME 262 shot down and three damaged. Two A Battery men were wounded seriously and two lightly during a raid by two of the jets. A truck was also damaged. (On the following day Pfc. Faubian of A Battery died of wounds.) The enemy radio claimed on March 15 that the Remagen bridge and the pontoon bridge had been knocked out by the bombing planes.⁴⁵

But this in fact was the worst day for the Luftwaffe in its encounters with the anti-aircraft around the bridges. Official German records showed that 21 fast planes were sent in to try to knock out the bridges, and 16 of these were shot down. This was too costly for the Luftwaffe.⁴⁶

Only one plane was fired on by 535th gunners on March 16. Two planes were heard out of sight on March 17, and one bomb was dropped that day.⁴⁷

Pfc. Creed Wilson recalled that during the firing on the bridgehead his gun section shot at a German plane and hit a falling bomb, which exploded in the air. Before detonating, the bomb had "sort of floated down like a feather." Wilson remembered the air as being full of shells and bullets including colored tracers when the German raiders zoomed in.

The B Battery soldier also saw two P-38s collide in the air while pursuing a ME 109. T/5 Kim Bell, a Medic, also saw the P-38 accident and watched both pilots parachute to safety on the west bank of the Rhine.

"They had tried to get a bead on a ME 109 that had just dropped a bomb near the Remagen bridge. That German got two P-38s without firing a shot."

The Germans tried two other weapons on the bridges-- a huge 17-centimeter railroad gun, and V-2 rockets. The railroad gun on the southeastern edge of the bridgehead caused the most damage in the town of Remagen. Troops of the 535th and other units east of the river were fairly well protected by the steep Erpeler Ley. Hitler also was reported "determined to wipe out the bridgehead by saturating it with V-2s," regardless of the civilian population.⁴⁸

An engineer who reported his reactions later to the V-2s at Remagen said that "the biggest and best artillery in the world" couldn't compare with those rockets. He was deafened by one of the explosions and felt as if "my guts had been sucked right back into my backbone."⁴⁹

After the Luftwaffe's abortive attempts to destroy the bridges, Hitler had swimmers dispatched to the area in an effort to blow up the spans. Several of the would-be saboteurs were captured in the area near the bridges on March 17.⁵⁰

Some of the 535th men heard a noise at the Ludendorff Bridge about 3 p.m. March 17, and looked over in time to see the span collapsing. Creed Wilson said the bridge folded up as if in slow motion, and dropped into the Rhine. In a few minutes it had settled to the bottom.

Lt. Col. Francis and Major Janney were standing on the river bank at Linz and saw the last girders go under. The colonel recalled:

Sergeant Adamson was at a 535th lookout on the roof of a castle on the river with spotter T/5 Tom Beynon when the two men saw the span fall into the river.⁵¹

An engineer about one hundred yards downstream heard a "screeching, cracking, splintering noise" as the bridge gave way. The bridge also was reported to have fallen with "a rumble and a shudder," and with a swish.⁵²

By that time the captured railway bridge had been closed to traffic. The pontoon bridges were being used exclusively.⁵³

Numerous engineers were reported working on the bridge trying to offset with repairs the cumulative stresses and strains on the bridge. A German demolition charge had severed a main supporting girder. The bridge also had been shaken by shelling and bombs, by the tons of supplies that had rumbled over; firing of anti-aircraft guns also was considered a factor in possibly weakening the noted bridge. Only the three stone piers and the approaches were left standing after the March 17 collapse. Final toll in dead and missing was 28. Sixty-three other GIs were injured when they were thrown into the Rhine, during the collapse.⁵⁴

At the time the bridge fell, four divisions were east of the river and 20,000 troops had been pushed by the Germans into the battle for the bridgehead.⁵⁵

Luftwaffe activity in the area of the bridge was only slight from March 18 through 20. The 535th guns fired some "barrages" during this time, or in the terminology preferred by the First Army anti-aircraft section, "calculated dispersions of computer concentrations." Recapitulating, 21st Army Group stated that 433 German planes were over the bridgehead-- 126 were claimed destroyed and 46 probably destroyed.⁵⁶

But the American command still remained wary about possible efforts to destroy the U.S.-built bridges. On March 20 barrage balloons were put up near a pontoon bridge, reminiscent of Normandy days, and the same day D Battery put out extra guards after being alerted of possible parachutist attack. The same day Batteries A, B and C were relieved of defense of the bridge vicinity and were re-attached to the 99th Division artillery. Battery D was taken off the bridge job next day and re-attached to the 99th Division artillery.⁵⁷

The 99th had been taking part in the job of expanding the bridgehead.

Hard core of German resistance was reported at the east end of the bridgehead, where German tanks and self-propelled weapons were said at the time to be preventing a breakout toward Berlin. However, the First Army actually was being held back by the U.S. commanders to coordinate with planned drives to the north and south of us along the Rhine.⁵⁸

Most of the public's attention had been focused on the First Army's front and Remagen, but on the night of March 22 the Third Army swarmed across the Rhine River in strength. The Germans said amphibious tanks as well as assault boats had been used.⁵⁹

Announcement was made that on March 24 four armies had crossed the Rhine on a 30-mile front. The British Second Army and part of the Canadian First Army had attacked, with the allied First Airborne Army, while the Ninth Army had crossed into the Ruhr. Naval landing craft such as were used in the Normandy invasion were reported pouring "unending streams of troops, guns and materiel into the breach."⁶⁰

Men of the 535th listened to the booming of the big guns on the night of March 24-25 as the First Army's artillery prepared the way for the offensive deeper into Germany. The First's troops comprised of the and 78th Infantry divisions and supporting units broke out of their bridgehead March 25 on a 35-mile front and gained nine miles on the new push. Newsmen, who termed this "another St. Lo" for the First Army, said endless columns moved up along dusty roads on this warm spring day through hills where the legend of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs originated. German engineers had blown up every bridge, chopped down trees and planted mines "as thick as birdseed" along every road, slowing the pace of the drive somewhat.¹

Battalion CP for the 535th moved to Hausen, high on a hillside, on the first day. From there could be seen many green fields and several villages down in the valley. The sun was warm and there was a breeze, and the hum of American motorized columns below was a drowsy sound, like bees in summer. Sometimes a little squeaking could be heard in the distant columns, the sound of tanks moving up. When a soldier reflected that this was only one part of the Western front, the size of the total effort, the amount of equipment and the supply job were staggering to consider.

On March 26 the Seventh Army crossed the Rhine to the south. First Army tanks were rolling ahead, and there was no solid line up front now. The Seventh Armored Division passed through the 99th on March 26 and gained 30 miles-- the tanks' way had been cleared in the 99th drive that started three days earlier.²

The 535th's Koerber jotted in his diary that "our tanks moved up all night." The Germans, he observed, "are running so fast we can't keep up with them."

Koerber moved March 26, along with many other 535th men, including Headquarters GIs who loaded up and headed toward Ndr. Honnefeld, on a fine sunny day. Buds were starting to sprout on limbs-- nature was entering its annual cycle of revival and growth despite death and war. A weeping willow leafed out in light green was a pleasant, nostalgic sight in the hill country, where villages fitted snugly down into the valleys, and we could see patches of forest all over this German countryside. We convoyed on a secondary road, jammed with vehicles of the 99th Division and attached units moving up, passed bivouacs of many tanks and halftracks, and fields where the big artillery guns and our Battalion's 40mm guns which defended them were hooked to trucks, ready to slip into the traffic Stream. People in the villages stood and looked, stunned, it seemed. At one place two MPs, each with a tommy gun in the crook of his arm, sat guarding a bunch of German POWs in graygreen overcoats who stared at the American vehicles rolling past. Some civilians had a rope tied around the legs of a dead horse and were tugging at the animal, trying to pull it out of a hole. There was the usual would-be comedian in one of the trucks wearing a black top hat he had picked up someplace. The remains of war littered the landscape in various spots-- a couple of wrecked German cars, freshly-dug foxholes, C-ration cans and pieces of K-ration boxes. Scattered among the old fallen leaves were many black helmets which had been shed by German soldiers.

As usual, Headquarters picked a house for Battalion CP, this time at Ndr. Honnefeld, and the civilians were told to move out. The three women living there cried and gave us a story about poor grandma and poor baby and other woes. Their alleged troubles seemed very minor however in comparison with what we'd seen back in France and Belgium, the suffering and destruction.

Battalion CP moved again, to Leuferod, on March 27.

From the firing units, reports were starting to come back on German troops captured or turning themselves in. A considerable number were taken in from the disintegrating Wehrmacht by the 535th in ensuing days, scores of captives, but the © exact total is not known.³ The Luftwaffe still was trying to aid its retreating comrades on the ground, and on March 28 Battery B shot down a ME109 and FW 190, while D fired on two ME 109s and downed one of these.⁴

The same day Battalion CP was moved to Lohnberg, where more evidence was visible on the Third Reich ripping apart at the seams. Freed French POWs and German civilians looted a freight train standing on a siding after the train's engine had been strafed, and hauled away new bicycles, grain, tobacco and personal effects of German officers.⁵

We already were encountering some scattered individuals and milling groups of the huge horde of "slave laborers" reported to be east of the Rhine River. One earlier estimate had placed the number of such people at 12 million, made up of 15 national groups, mostly Russian, Polish and French.⁶ The 3,500 displaced persons found in 15 square miles at

Remagen was only a tiny sampling of what we were to encounter. In the last days of March, 400,000 DPs were taken in care of armies of the Twelfth Army Group in 24 hours. The group reported:

A common practice of these displaced persons upon the approach of American troops, was either to evade or shoot their guards, reverse direction and start trekking westward. It was reported that when our troops met many of these displaced persons, they were already exhibiting "liberation complex," with evidences of great joy, not to mention considerable quantities of alcohol, and a disposition to appropriate whatever caught their fancy.⁷

Pfc. Fred Staab of C Battery recalled that as his gun section came to a small town in Germany they saw four or five Russian displaced persons heading out of town with a horse hitched to a wagon. A German farmer rushed up to the 535th men and started talking to the sergeant. Because the sergeant could not understand German he sent the farmer to Staab. The Russians were getting away with his horse, the excited complainant explained.

"Well, there will be a military governor here in a few days and he will take care of the Russians and German civilians," the 535th man said.

"But there goes my horse!" the German protested.

One of the cities where a lot of displaced persons were freed was Wetzlar, which had been taken on March 29. Some 535th troops took up positions there the same day, guarding highway bridges. Battery B had been assigned March 29 to defense of bridge crossings on the Lahn River between Wetzlar and Dorlar. The first platoon of C Battery took up positions on the Lahn to defend the crossings of American troops. First platoon of Battery A was defending bridges at Giessen, and the second platoon protected bridges on the Lahn.⁸

Most of the excitement that day seems to have been concentrated at Wetzlar, which Sgt. Ed Cunningham, a staff correspondent of YAWX, reported contained 21,000 citizens and 15,000 foreign laborers who had been imported to work in several industrial plants including the Leica camera factory.

Cunningham stated that after the infantry and tanks went through, mopping up resistance, the city was left to a military government crew and the 535th, also the DPs. The latter kicked off what the writer termed "Paris and Kiev and Maastricht and Brussels all rolled up in one combined celebration of newly-regained freedom," one of the gayest 24 hours in the city's history.

Less than half an hour after the last German surrendered, the 15,000 forced residents began streaming out of their barbwire-enclosed barracks to celebrate. Russians, Frenchmen, Dutch, Belgians, Poles and even a few stray Italians joined in the international festivity, and one of their first stops was the nearest liquor cellars to requisition Rhine wine and cognac for the occasion.

The undated clipping from YANK, preserved by William C. Tiller of A Battery of the 535th, also commented:

The Americans in Wetzlar didn't do badly for themselves, either. The ack-ack crews, all members of the 535th AAA Battalion, set up their CP in the home of a German furniture manufacturer. The German seemed unusually pleased to see them and hurriedly moved his own home to his nearby factory.

The Americans were somewhat mystified by this unexpected hospitality until an English-speaking French worker told them the German had used several Russian laborers in his factory. The Russians, it seemed, didn't consider him a model employer and he knew it.

So he figured it would be very good for his continued health to have a few Americans within calling distance if the Russians decided to offer more tangible evidence of their opinions.

But the payoff in hospitality in Wetzlar on March 29 was offered by the Russians, not the Germans, Cunningham wrote. Beneficiaries were the crew of 535th guns set up near an area where several hundred female foreign workers were quartered. Cunningham explained:

The GI crew had just started to dig their gun positions when a half dozen sturdily stacked Russian girls came up and motioned for them to turn over their shovels. The Yanks didn't get the idea very fast. So one Soviet sister grabbed an unused shovel and started digging. Catching on fast then, the Americans handed over their shovels. Fifteen minutes later they had a well-dug gun pit--thanks to the strong arms of the Russian girls.

The roistering at Wetzlar continued for many hours.

On the same day-- March 29-- of the Wetzlar celebration, the 535th Battalion CP was established in Rodheim. Approximately 200 German soldiers were standing in a vacant lot guarded by MPs and by French laborers who had been armed with carbines. Some of the POWs apparently were residents of the village, for women and girls hung about the edge of the lot, looking fearfully and moving jerkily. A woman would bring out a loaf of bread or a gray Wehrmacht canteen full of water and point out to the guard which POW should get the refreshments. A MP thought the females were getting too close, bellowed angrily, "Raus!" and shoved his carbine at them. They backed off, and some of the women in the rear broke and fled, stopping to stare back and then sprinting away again.

The Medics' quarters at Rodheim were across from the POW pen, Norman Bergstrom recalled. The 535th's chaplain held Good Friday services in a German Lutheran church, where a foot-pumped organ was a curiosity. Civilians were "a bit amazed" to see the GIs using their church.⁹

Up ahead of the American troops about this time, fighter pilots could find only scattered targets and no sign of German tanks or troops moving up to cope with the breakout. Not even road blocks or mines now slowed the eastward advance. White cloths flapped from almost every German house.¹⁰

First Army tanks had nearly cut off the heavily-industrialized Ruhr region from the rest of Germany by March 29. They had crossed a railway and superhighway, leaving only two rail lines linking the Ruhr with Berlin. On March 30, an observer reported, "the plains and valleys were dotted with burning villages set ablaze by tank shells when foolish German soldiers offered some resistance from houses." By April 1 armored columns of the First and Ninth armies had completely encircled the Ruhr, an area containing about 4,800 square miles. Thousands of foreign workers were being liberated from fields and factories.¹¹ Many of these broke out of barb-wire stockades in which they had been penned near the small, decentralized industrial plants that had been scattered outside the Ruhr.¹²

The 99th Infantry Division was assembling in the vicinity of Gemunden on April 1 to continue its attack eastward when orders were received to drive against the large pocket of Germans still remaining in the Ruhr area.¹³ The 535th's CP had moved that day to Langendorf, where we saw our first town crier, and Easter services were held in a very small and old Lutheran Church.¹⁴

On April 4 the 99th Division and attached units reassembled in the vicinity of Schwarzenau, 20 miles west of Gemunden, and the 535th's CP was established at Beddelhausen. The second platoon of Battery D took on the job of protecting Eder River bridges near Hatzfeld, and was replaced in support of the 667th Field Artillery Battalion by a platoon of Battery C. On April 5 the 99th Division attacked on a 10-mile front, in rugged terrain, and from April 6 continued its reduction of the enemy forces in the pocket, pushing toward the northwest, with the 535th providing anti-aircraft protection. Some of the Battalion's vehicles bogged down periodically on muddy roads as the convoys moved up. People in villages just captured peeped warily out of their windows at our trucks and equipment moving forward. There was a total absence of Nazi flags or portraits of Hitler. The white flag formed by a sheet or towel dangled limply from upper windows or from the fences of farm houses along the way.¹⁵

On April 7, Headquarters and Medics were at Wingeshausen, where Norman Bergstrom swapped a .38 revolver for two cameras-- "the Army," he observed, "has produced quite an array of traders in the ETO."¹⁶ About April 9 Headquarters moved to Saalhausen¹⁷ where some of the GIs tried fishing in a nearby stream and found that hand grenades produced more fish than the hook-and-line methods. Down the road a few hundred yards lived hundreds of Russian civilians, who spent the daytimes out of doors and huddled together in caves in a granite cliff at night.¹⁸

Displaced persons were increasingly commonplace along the 535th's route, as we traveled toward the shrinking Ruhr pocket. They were streaming back toward their homeland in small groups, unwilling to wait for transport, although a number had acquired bikes to speed their journeys. Many were POWs, and some of these were seen hiking one day in infantry files along an autobahn to the west. Frenchmen pushing and pulling a big cart in which their belongings were piled, with a tricolor perched on top, waved at Headquarters trucks and jeeps rolling past.

During one of the convoy stops a prisoner from Liege questioned some Headquarters personnel about how severely the city had been damaged. A Russian youth some of us talked with said he never would have been taken alive in the fighting at Kharkov if he had not been wounded. At the German factory where he worked the POWs were treated "like animals and pigs," and beatings were frequent, we were told.

At one place outside the Ruhr pocket, Headquarters men saw a large group of starved Russian prisoners, walking and limping like old men, in tattered clothes that hung loosely to their scrawny bodies. We could not imagine that they had once been soldiers. One stretched out in a field and died. Another ate some of the Army chow and got sick-- he could not take such nourishment. The POWs wandered streets of a town with a sack of potatoes or other food they had acquired in raids on German cellars, and they had grabbed a can or two in which to place their food. Their eyes were always on the ground searching for American cigarette butts. The seemingly well-fed Germans watched them with cold eyes. To view at first hand an indication of the animosities between the Germans and Russians was something new to our ack-ack men.

The Germans had been feeding foreign workers in the Ruhr about 1,100 calories of food per day, just enough to keep them working. Russian POWs got considerably less than that.¹⁹

Meantime, the diehard Ruhr troops were trying to hold off the Allied noose, maintaining what the German communique of April 10 called "the coherent character" of the front by repeated counterattacks. Fires glowed April 11 all along the fringes of the Ruhr, marking the effects of bombing and artillery and the German demolition of key points which had been given up only after tough resistance. An Engineer sergeant who saw the 99th artillery in action April 10 wrote:

The flame and thunder is amazing and somehow very exciting. The concussion is terrific. Man, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of it.

One big gun after another went off, right down the line.²⁰

From April 10 to 15 the 99th Division drove 30 miles northwest on a 9-mile front, encountering groups of Germans who fought fiercely in towns or from natural defensive positions on the terrain, but the enemy was unable to reorganize and coordinate a line. Prisoners streamed into cages in what a historian called "amazing numbers."²¹

The 535th's line batteries in this same period continued to provide protection to the artillery, except that as the 99th advanced up the Eder and Lenne valleys, the second platoon of D protected, in succession, the river crossings at Wingeshausen, Saalhausen and Grevenbruck, as Corps AAA units advanced to relieve them.²² In the artillery area the Luftwaffe was scarce but German planes were being sent against U.S. troops in the forward areas. Luftwaffe bases had been overrun in the drive east of the Rhine but the enemy managed to keep a considerable number of planes airborne. Gen. Henry Arnold, chief of the U.S. Air Forces, said the Germans had as many planes as ever although many could not be used because of lack of pilots and fuel.²³

But even with a scarcity of ack-ack shooting here, the 535th men found plenty of activity of interest.

A Battery Journal reported intermittent shelling from the Germans on the 99th's drive north. On April 11 D Battery halftracks got a march order to move into positions to support front-line infantry.

following day when the battery's weapons were moved up again on one of the frequent changes of positions, Pfc. Robert Koerber's halftrack was in its new firing site at Fretter but not dug in in the late afternoon. A barrage of 88s shrilled in early in the evening and "splattered all around us." Then two huge shells which Koerber identified as 176mm slammed in and hit about 75 feet from No. 2 halftrack. Each big shell dug a hole large enough to drive the halftrack in, Koerber stated. Shrapnel hit Milton "Pete" Peterson in one leg.²⁴

Battalion CP moved from Fretter to Allendorf on April 13, and Medics who bivouacked in a green field found that pup-tent life was a treat after so long indoors. On the second night at Allendorf the 535th men were in their bags when they heard a machine gun open up in the draw above them four times, as if someone might be "goofing off." Next morning we found that the man on the armored car parked above our bivouac had seen a dozen Germans "armed to the teeth," he said, by the light of an artillery flash; they were walking toward us. The GI mowed them down. Four Germans had been killed, and several injured. During the morning young boys hauled away the bodies in wheelbarrows.²⁵

On April 14 Headquarters moved to its last CP, before the end of the Ruhr pocket. This was at Westig less than 15 miles southeast of Dortmund. Numerous Russians were wandering in Westig begging and stealing food. At first enemy mortars were dropping in and there was fighting near the outskirts.²⁶

Pfc. Koerber heard "lots of firing" from the front that day, and he and Peterson decided to go up "and take a look." They walked about two and one-half miles and took a pair of binoculars from a German command car which still was smoking from a shell hit. As shells were whistling in again, Peterson and Koerber took cover in a ditch. When they looked out again they found that the command car had been smashed again. The pair returned to their unit, and on the following day, Sunday, heard "heavy firing way off in the distance all morning."²⁷

On April 15 orders were issued by the Germans in the Ruhr pocket that small groups should be formed under selected officers and should try to find a way through to the east. Soldiers without weapons or ammunition were "to allow themselves to be overrun." A report of April 16 stated that the First Army had bisected the pocket, and on that day all resistance ended suddenly in the eastern part of the pocket, including the front in the 99th Division sector.²⁸

The Germans came in to surrender, on foot and in all kinds of cars, trucks and horsedrawn wagons, with a few tanks mixed in, while 535th soldiers had a front-row look at the collapse of a major part of the remaining Wehrmacht.

"The remnants of one Panzer division drove their monstrous Tiger Royal tanks to our POW cage," Bergstrom wrote. "It was an impressive sight to say the least."²⁹

Pfc. Koerber was among the photo fans taking pictures of the giant surrender. "Prisoners went by all day and it looks like they will be all night," he wrote on April 16.³⁰ Pfc. Edward Barrett of A Battery watched seven German tanks loaded down with enemy troops coming in to give up, and one GI on the last tank guarding them. One German in the long parade from the front gave the V for victory sign with an upraised hand.

S/Sgt. Raymond Dixon remembered:

There was difficulty in getting the elite German prisoners to stack up tightly enough in the trucks transporting them to POW camps. There needed to be six more prisoners loaded on one truck, but the men would not squeeze forward, so the sergeant in charge said, "I'll fix that," as he jumped into the cab of the truck and accelerated rapidly ahead and then suddenly jammed on the brakes. The prisoners were thrown violently to the front of the trucks and the others were loaded onto the rear. Mission accomplished.

Pfc. Fat Lee of D Battery, whose halftrack had the job of helping receive and guard the POWs, while U.S. trucks hauled them away, recalled that "this was the day we had the grand feeling-- every one of us had a smile on our face."

About a company of U.S. infantry was standing near Lee's halftrack, a few of them hanging out their helmets, when the Germans trooped up the slope on the edge of a small town. Lee watched the infantry taking items out of the hands of the prisoners, anything that might be considered of military importance. Some of the Germans rode in jeeps, on armored cars, and even on an occasional tank.

Load after load of prisoners was hauled away to nearby camps in the rear, and more Germans were coming in.

By nightfall the surrendering troops who did not get immediate transportation were herded into a large empty yard with a wire around them.

Each POW was issued a blanket and some food, and the prisoners built a few bonfires to keep warm.

"They sang and sang for some time, for encouragement-- a tiger army suddenly became a pet cat," Lee remembered.

Evacuation of 21,000 prisoners who surrendered to the 99th Division in a single day resulted in a serious transportation problem which necessitated providing 27 trucks from the ack-ack to the 99th for POW hauling. This temporarily immobilized Batteries A and B, and one platoon of D.³¹

The 99th Division's total take of prisoners in reduction of the pocket was 42,283. The outfit had driven 50 miles in 12 days on a nine-mile front to complete its part in eliminating the large force as a fighting group.³²

Remnants of three German armies were taken in the Ruhr pocket. They included survivors from the Pas deCalais and Battle of the Bulge, as well as new teen-age recruits, and 100,000 flak troops whose heavy concentration of guns had defended the Ruhr. Total take was 325,000 German troops. Eighteen divisions had been assigned to the reduction of the Ruhr pocket, which held out for 18 days.³³

American commanders had been concerned about reports that the most fanatic of the Germans might retreat to a "National Redoubt" in southern Bavaria, western Austria and northern Italy, where weapons, stores and even aircraft plants were supposed to be cached, and continue the fight there indefinitely.

In early April General Eisenhower believed that "a very large number" of troops would be needed to run down and destroy guerrilla bands and didn't believe there would be a "clear-cut" military surrender on the Western front. About April 11, support seemed to be forthcoming for this view in a report of American pilots who had seen huge convoys of vehicles, streaming bumper to bumper down roads leading to Berchtesgaden, which was said to be destined to be the center of hard-core resistance.³⁴

As part of the stepped-up effort to crush German resistance in southern Germany, the III Corps commanded by Maj. Gen. James Van Fleet was transferred from the First to the Third Army. As part of this shift, the 535th received orders on the morning of April 17 to move from Westig to Bamberg,³⁵ about 30 miles northwest of Nurnberg. For this trip, all unit designations on clothing and vehicles were covered, Bergstrom recalled. The two major units involved in the move were the 99th and the 14th Armored Division, and the total distance involved in the "secret" convoy was 285 miles, according to a 99th historian.³⁶

The 535th convoyed south through beautiful countryside and on the first night Headquarters pulled up in a park at Bad Orb. Cooks were making coffee when a plane that had buzzed above the lights of the convoy roared down, its machine guns firing, and tracers flew through the darkness. Everybody dropped cups of coffee, and four GIs fell on a Kansas youth who had been dishing out the java. He was well splashed. The convoy's lights were switched off quickly, and as the plane roared in again most of the Headquarters GIs took cover behind the banks of a creek. Battery B's Captain Dickerson, who was narrowly missed in the convoy during the strafing, ordered four machine guns and a halftrack set up for security after B's vehicles had pulled into an orchard.³⁷ We heard that some men in the convoys, apparently not ours, were killed. Planes hummed overhead all night.

On April 19 the 535th rolled further south, and Headquarters set up its CP that night at Eltmann, over 10 miles northwest of Bamberg.³⁸

Further south, Nurnberg, the old Nazi partying ground of 430,000 population, was encircled the same day and reportedly mostly in U.S. hands.³⁹

Battalion moved on south to a CP on April 21 at Langenzeen, where hail and rain were frequent, about 10 miles west of Nurnberg, and to Schwabach, just south of Nurnberg, on April 22, the day the drive to capture the National Redoubt was kicked off.⁴⁰ Overpasses on the autobahn had been blown up by the retreating Germans and the 535th convoys had to use side roads a considerable part of the time. In the square at Schwabach, Headquarters trucks were halted, waiting to make contact with the reconnaissance party in a drizzle, and civilians peered cautiously out their windows at us. For the first time, we were participating in a Third Army offensive, but, as Norman Bergstrom noted, "our pride was injured because we were not allowed to use the First Army patch any more."

That day, April 22, the 99th had been committed on the right flank of the Third Army, to advance generally southeast. The 535th's guns were defending Division artillery, except for a platoon of D protecting the Division CP. On April 22 B sent one platoon to defend a landing field in the Furth area, just northwest of Nurnberg. This platoon returned to artillery protection on April 24. The second platoon of Battery A moved to positions near Rednitzhemback on April 23 to protect bridges over the Rednitz River, was relieved by a Corps unit on April 25 and went back to artillery.⁴¹

Nurnberg, taken April 20,⁴² was now falling well in the rear. Reports on April 23 stated that the new U.S. drive in the south had swept 53 miles, that 33,000 prisoners had been taken in the opening hours. Tanks and troops were "running wild" across rivers and hills, it was reported. In addition to the Third Army effort, the French First and U.S. Seventh armies also were driving ahead.⁴³

The 535th's CP moved to Hilpotstein on April 24, and to Greding, even more southeasterly, on April 25. On this same day the columns of the 99th reached the first of a series of river obstacles. The roughest fighting was at Altumuhl River, but the 99th also attacked at the Ludwig Canal. At night the Luftwaffe was out again to aid the river defenders, and the planes strafed vehicles on the Munich autobahn, near Battalion CP. The 99th's attack continued through the night and in the morning of April 26 the Division broke out of its bridgehead, advanced about 15 miles during the day to the Danube River and by nightfall spearhead combat teams of the 99th had completely cleared the Danube's west bank.⁴⁴

Headquarters of the 535th convoyed further southeast, to Sandersdorf, about 10 miles north of the Danube, on April 26.⁴⁵ The situation was changing so rapidly now that we sometimes were "leapfrogging" the infantry; at times we passed columns of dirty, heavily laden foot soldiers trekking by the road after the retreating Germans.

Up ahead, the RAF attacked Berchtesgaden, Hitler's noted retreat, with 6-ton "earthquake" bombs on April 25,⁴⁶ and on April 27 tanks invaded Austria.⁴⁷

On April 27, Colonel Francis was informed of the 99th's plans for crossing the Danube River, and the battery commanders were assembled for a briefing on the change in missions, which called for protection of the Danube crossings by three platoons, and support of the field artillery by the remaining five platoons. Troops of the 99th crossed the Danube in assault boats at 11 a.m., and the beachhead was established successfully at 1:30. The Germans resisted fiercely at one town on the southeast bank, but finally were overcome.⁴⁸

Pfc. Koerber was on the road again at 1:30 p.m. "Tiger tank fired a couple of rounds our way and you could see the projectile going through the air," the GI stated. At 2:30 the halftrack was in position at Marching. Koerber wrote:

Rockets are exploding all around us. 88s came in from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. real heavy and very close. I am not only stiff from the cold but scared too. I can hear shrapnel hit the side of the halftrack.⁴⁹

In addition to the scattered artillery which hit in the 535th area, the enemy also had planes out again and A Battery guns blasted at the aircraft.⁵⁰

The 535th’s guns were all in new positions on April 28 despite difficult traffic conditions and terrain, and secondrate roads. The Germans were fighting bitterly as the 99th expanded its beachhead 7,000 yards on April 28, Eighty-eight shells had been falling in D Battery area until about 4 in the morning, when rain started falling.⁵¹

Headquarters of the 535th crossed the Danube, which was milky instead of the "beautiful blue" that some of us had expected, and set up a new CP at Pfeffenhausen on April 29. A Tiger Royal tank blocked the road in front of the mess hall. Medics stayed in a combination grocery store and house where swallows lived in the kitchen and the landlady cautioned the GIs to keep the windows open so the birds could get outdoors.⁵²

On April 29 the 99th Division resumed its rapid drive to the southeast and reached Isar River on April 30.⁵³

Some Luftwaffe planes skimmed over the area late in the month but were flying high and generally took no hostile action. The 535th gunners fired on several of the enemy craft.⁵⁴

By this time the Axis was cracking apart so badly that it was hard to keep up with the latest news of the debacle. On April 28 Mussolini was killed with his mistress on Lake Como, and on April 29 a mob was kicking and spitting on his corpse in a Milan square. All organized resistance ended in three-quarters of Munich on April 30, and Seventh Army GIs were crossing the Isar River to clear out snipers in the holdout section of the city. The Third Army was reported to have seized control of 60 miles of Isar River northeast of Munich and to have crossed at three points. On April 30 the Russians were reported to have captured the Reichstag in Berlin.⁵⁵

Two combat teams of the 99th crossed Isar River on April 30. The Germans resisted but Landshut was taken by morning and 99th troops continued on 11 miles southeast.⁵⁶

At the start of May the 535th CP was set up in Wurth on the north side of the Isar River, and the guns were mainly protecting the artillery. Battery B covered construction of the treadway bridge on Isar River at Landshut about 35-40 miles northeast of Munich on May 1, and a platoon moved on the same day to the south side of the Danube when the bridge was completed. Trucks borrowed earlier to move the 99th's rear echelon were returned on May 1, and A Battery then was able to move over the Isar with some of the 99th's artillery. On May 3 B Battery returned to the artillery.⁵⁷

Battalion headquarters moved over the Isar on May 2 to Geisenhausen, which was destined to be our most southerly CP in Germany. This was southeast of Landshut, about 35 miles northeast of Munich, over 20 miles from the Inn River and about 60 miles in a direct line from Salzburg. Ahead of us, looming snowily against the horizon, were the Alps, and in an almost direct line with the route we had been traveling was Berchtesgaden.

Berlin fell to the Russians on May 2 and it was reported that Hitler and Propaganda Minister Goebbels were suicides. Pfc. Koerber, who was in a farm house at the time, celebrated the death of Hitler with some of his buddies, utilizing alcohol that had been brought from the Rhine River and saved specially for this occasion. On this day, too, an estimated 1 million German and Italian troops were reported to have yielded, without firing a shot, the heart of the National Redoubt in the Alps, in the first unconditional surrender of its type in Europe. Bavaria was not included in the surrender, and General Eisenhower had told troops to press south and mop up all resistance. However, the 99th and attached units were held in the Geisenhausen-Landshut area. Tanks and heavy guns were pulling back from the front in this vicinity on May 3.⁵⁸

At 1:30 p.m. May 3 the G-2 of 99th Division called the 535th to report that the 394th Infantry regiment had shot down an enemy plane, killing the pilot and seriously injuring the other member of the crew, a sergeant. The sergeant told questioners that about 50 planes from an airport at Salzburg, Austria, were being flown out by the pilots, who would go as far as they could with the available gas, then "crash land" or parachute to earth for purposes of sabotage. All 535th batteries were notified that enemy air activity might be expected.⁵⁹

The 535th's gun batteries moved May 5 into a concentration area generally southeast of Geisenhausen, with Division artillery, with half of the firing units providing protection and the remainder out of action for maintenance. Already plans were moving ahead for occupation of Germany. Colonel Francis got orders on May 6 for the 535th to occupy Schweinfurt Landkreis, and on the following morning billeting parties had left Geisenhausen for Schweinfurt.⁶⁰

On May 7 a message was received from the 99th Division's chief of staff stating that an armistice had been signed effective at the start of May 9. Last action of the war by the 535th took place on the afternoon of May 8 when No. 3 40mm gun and No. 3 halftrack of D Battery fired on a German liaison plane after two had flown over, one to the northeast and the other west. Fires started on the horizon in the direction which the plane had been firing.⁶¹

We had not heard artillery in the 535th Headquarters area for one and a half weeks, and the ending of the war in Europe was anticlimactic, leaving most of the GIs with no feeling of elation, just a vague restlessness. There was a tendency to be prepared for anything, such as reaching an arm out of bed to make certain the helmet was within reach, a habit acquired on the beach in Normandy.

If a person wanted to think much, there was plenty to think about, maybe like the quip of Leonard Bass of Headquarters Battery, one which we had laughed about in earlier days:

I'm going to stick this war out through thick and thin. When it gets too thick, I'm gonna thin out.

Bass and the rest of us had not run out, although at times things were a bit "thick."

We could ponder, too, about several of our 535th fellows who had been taken prisoner and who had been liberated. One of them said that when POWs were marched through towns and villages German civilians, especially younger ones, would spit in their faces. At Nurnberg this 535th man had shrunk from lack of food to 105-110 pounds and sometimes when he got out of bed to go to the latrine he would black out and other POWs would help him back to bed. At the very end the POWs were treated much better, he added.

And a GI could think also about the German kids in the rear areas cheering and waving at Americans. Many of them were yelling, "Comrade! Chocolate!" And some even were equipped with a big sign pleading, "Give us some candy please."

In some ways the war didn't make much sense.

But the spring weather was nice on May 8, the last day officially for World War II in Europe. Fields around Geisenhausen were full of yellow dandelions, and a breeze was blowing in the windows of the Battalion headquarters after a nice warm spring day.

Shortly after noon on May 9 the 535th's Battalion CP was closed at Geisenhausen, and the convoys began moving north by road toward Schweinfurt landkreis. That night, the drivers switched on their headlights and the bright beams stabbed the darkness for miles. In one burned-out town, we looked down into a valley and saw half a dozen houses lighted. The sight made the heart feel glad, about 15 months of blackout for the 535th, first in England and later on the continent.

At Schweinfurt, the 535th found another wrecked city and a special symbol of German hardnose resistance.

The city had a population of about 40,000 before the war, but the total was considerably less when the 535th moved in, although apparently building up again. Schweinfurt had been hit a number of times by heavy bombers and largely wrecked from a surface appearance. But recent on-the-spot investigations had shown that despite the heavy structural damage most of the noted ball-bearing plants had gone underground. When Schweinfurt was captured by GIs after a bitter fight, soldiers uncovered a number of elaborate underground bomb shelters and workshops. Even up to a few days before the final capture a trickle of bearings and plane parts had been produced. Lt. Gen. Walter Beedle estimated that 85 per cent of the ball-bearing plants had gone underground, following the Allied bombings.¹

Even in the wreckage that the 535th found, Schweinfurt was important enough that one of the ballbearing plants was to carry the label Reparations No. 1 in the reparations program worked out in principle by the governments of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union in June 1945. Dismantling of this plant started later than several other German installations, but it was the first reparations equipment to be shipped out, on March 31, 1946. This huge Kugelfischer ballbearing plant was loaded on rail cars and forwarded to Bremen, where it was shipped to the Soviet Union.²

Among the few buildings still intact in mid-May 1945 were three huge structures in the west end of town marked, with red crosses. An officer said shortly after the city's capture that these buildings, which had escaped bombings and artillery, had been used as barracks for German tank troops.³

But the inhabitants were certainly more interesting than the buildings, in the brief time spent by the 535th 1” the Schweinfurt area.

The Germans were circulating through the city, picking up some kind of interim peacetime existence. German kids, women and old men were busy cleaning up, although they had only shovels, buckets and hand carts with which to work. Some scooped rubble from their gutters and carried it to nearby bomb holes. On the edge of a third-floor room that had been sliced down the middle, a woman appeared one day as the author of BATTALION FROM THE MOJAVE was walking by and emptied a bucket of trash onto the rubble pile below, raising a white dust. Such work seemed puny alongside the stupendous damage, the ruins and the big rubble heaps. few streets had disappeared completely, and the only trail through them would be a hard dirt path winding over uneven, cratered ground, a path trod by the Germans and other tra~ velers in those May days of 1945.

Schweinfurt residents seemed to fall into three general categories.

Older Germans generally were friendly-appearing and cooperative. A number of them told us that they had relatives in the States-- a cousin in Ohio, sons in Chicago, and other kinfolk.

The younger people were cold and many would not look at us. Some gave out with quite nasty looks, which did not hurt the GIs' feelings a bit.

Little kids hung around out of curiosity and looking for handouts. On the day the cooks made cinnamon buns you could smell them for half a block, and there was a mob of youths out in back of the Headquarters mess.

Apparently such goodies were to smell even better to the Germans, in the next few months. The normal food rations per consumer had fallen to 1,050 calories, the lowest since World War I, just before VE Day, and slipped to an average of about 860 immediately after VE Day. Before many weeks had gone by, the occupying authorities had to boost the Germans' rations, "to prevent starvation and unrest," and this effort boosted the average daily number of calories to 980 before the 1945 harvest and to 1,550 about the first of June, 1946.⁴ At the time the 535th was in Schweinfurt, however, the Germans still appeared fairly well fed, and the problem of food and some other occupation issues still had to be worked out.

Across the street from the big German officers’ barracks in which the Battalion CP was situated was a camp for displaced persons, mostly Russians, Poles and Italians. You could see the shirtless males leaning out the windows of their barracks on an ordinary day, and a couple of GI guards walking alongside the fence. There was a promenade in the camp, a wide sidewalk. During the day it was full of strol1ers-- rough-looking men and big-bosomed women from eastern Europe.

On a short trip there, a GI might see a couple of the denizens wandering around with pieces of rubber hose in their hands while another tossed a knife, that skidded along the walk.

The barracks people, especially the 'Rooskeys," started tuning up about dark; the accordion and harmonica music started then. The Russians moved out into the yard and sang mournful songs and drank schnapps and vodka. Past midnight, lying in bed, the 535th men at Schweinfurt still could hear a vast murmur of voices from the camp, hollering, a scream once in a while, doors slamming, music and plenty of laughing. The Italians staged a dance one night and some of the Russian women attended. The Russian men did not like that and were going to "clean out the place," so two worried GIs who worked at the camp and three well-dressed Italians came over and asked us for help. We heard later that the Russians had shaved the heads of five of their women that night for fraternizing with the Italians. We could hear the tumult up to 1:30 a.m. People cheered and yelled as if they were at an exciting football game. The dance music would start playing louder and louder and people at the barracks area yelled even more vociferously. A rifle shot was fired, and the DPs cheered wildly. Mixed in with the commotion, someone was playing a bugle. When the DPs finally quieted down that night, we could hear numerous dogs barking in the distance. Too much liquor and no work were the causes of the troubles at the camp, an Italian DP said.

It was a miserable atmosphere for children-- growing up in crowded, squalid barracks, in war and its aftermath.

In most of Germany at the time the most difficult problem was reported not to be the handling of the docile German population but the rounding up and caring for foreign workers, An estimated 5 to 7 million of these people free other nations had been impressed into German services.

Thousands of DPs still were roaming on highways, hiding in woods and on farms.⁵

Most of the people arrested by the 535th in Schweinfurt were curfew violators, soldiers in civilian clothes, people with no passes, or foreign laborers stealing.

Here as elsewhere in the areas taken by U.S. troops, the Nazis were getting some special attention.

Lt. Gen. Lucius D. Clay, deputy military governor for General Eisenhower, stated in Paris May 16 that "men with a Nazi viewpoint and who have been active in the Nazi party will be purged, and purged quickly."⁶

On the night of May 19 the 535th rounded up five men who had been turned in by an informer as locally-important Nazis.

Three of these were scrawny-faced characters. One other suspect, a little man in a blue suit, wearing glasses, reportedly a propagandaleiter, took out his handkerchief and carefully brushed the dust of the road from his suit after being escorted to the Battalion CP. The fifth prisoner, a thin old man about 75 with baggy pants and weak cough, sat on the front steps of the barracks and slumped limply on one elbow, with his head down as if he was about ready to die. He was reported to be the Nazi big shot and the leading Jewbaiter in the area. The five Germans were interviewed one at a time inside, and Sgt. Arnold Fritz, working with Captain Craig, got two of them to admit their Nazi connections. The old man kept insisting in a mumbly voice that he had been a cook in an underground area.⁷

In the dusk of May 19, Sgt. Fritz and the writer of this book escorted the five Germans on foot to the jail, while civilians at lighted windows of the apartment house nearby peered out at us. The little man in the blue suit was crippled and had a difficult time keeping up.

At the lockup, the jailer sat the five men on benches in a hall while Fritz went to the office with the arrest papers. After about six or seven minutes of silence the little man in the blue suit began drumming his right-hand fingers on his left wrist, and a minute later his head began sagging. The five heads dropped almost together, and three of the men braced their heads with their hands.

The scene was reminiscent of a bare barracks room at Camp Elsenborn on the night of Dec. 17, when several of the fellows from Headquarters had been seated against a wall, at the end of the day in which he had been run out of Bullingen by the German tanks and had lost practically everything we had.

Each of the several helmeted heads in the room had dropped at approximately the same time, in one of our most dejected hours.

The Germans had been "on the march" again-- but that was in 1944. At Schweinfurt the Nazi power was broken, as evidenced by the woebegone quintet on the Schweinfurt jail benches.

B Battery was on MP duty in town near Schweinfurt, and Pfc. Creed Wilson recalled that his truck was exchanged for a jeep. The curfew was among the regulations being enforced, and people who did not want to obey were brought to a ring outside the schoolhouse-- a ring similar to a boxing ring-- and were required to stand there all night.

Numerous youngsters came and dug through the battery's garbage cans. Wilson said that he and other GIs scraped off considerable of their food for the youths. German kids would meet the soldiers for dinner and the customary split.

Also in B Battery, the first issue of a four-page newspaper called THE LIBERATOR was issued on May 20. Editor Lloyd Setleis attempted to come to grips with the occupation problem in his first editorial, "The Shell We Must Crack," dealing with the German mind and attitude, the nationalism and "craze for world power."

The topic of the day was reported to be the point system which was being used in determining priorities to go back to the United States. S/Sgt. Carl Tice, with 111 points, led the enlisted men of the battery. Luther Morris was quoted as saying he was ready to go to the Pacific theater of war "if they can find enough men to drag him to the boat."

Among various other offerings in the May 20 LIBERATOR were an item that Lt. George Bowie and eight enlisted men who had been attached to the 99th Division's security guard had returned to the 535th, an estimate that there had been about 50 "new faces" in the battery since D-Day, and a poem "Watching and Thinking," about "a sad situation," no fraternization, when a pretty girl passed with "a disturbing smile, eyes so inviting."

The occupation forces of that time had been warned against fraternization. They were advised not to carry a chip on their shoulder or to kick while people were down but "you are not here on a good-will errand either."⁸

In late May,⁹ the 535th moved from Schweinfurt to Lauf a small, rather unimportant, undamaged and picturesque manure-smelling country town about 15 miles northeast of Nurnberg. Battalion CP was set up in the town, and we also had various policing and guard responsibilities for a large portion of the Lauf kreis.

Once Lauf had been a walled town, and the main road still ran through the towers on opposite sides of the town, just wide enough for a wagon or car. In the middle the roadway flared out widely, with the rathaus (town hall) in the center and plenty of parking for our trucks and jeeps in the area, still leaving streets on both sides.

A grocery store was situated several doors down from Headquarters CP-- The Wild Man Inn-- and it specialized in sauerkraut. When the kraut was available, people passed by with buckets and dishes full of the smelly food, and we could see why the Germans were called krauts. A truck stopped in front of a doorway down the street, and its load of potatoes was shoveled into the street. An old man and woman scooped them up and carried them inside, basket by basket. At dawn the women of the town would line up, waiting for the store to open.

The people of Lauf were country types, and rather somber. The women were attractive but not as much as the big city gals of Liege. One who lived across the street had lost her first and second husbands in combat.

The few males left were cripples from the war. Hans, who had a family in a back street at Lauf, was missing the lower part of an arm. He said it had been torn off by an exploding American mortar shell. Dusty, limping German soldiers walked by one or two at a time from the east. When a truck carrying some German prisoners of war stopped in the Market Place, a Lauf woman distributed American candy bars and cigarettes to them.

The GIs rolled up and down the dignified, cobblestone streets in jeeps, with radios blaring "My Dreams are Getting Better all the Time," "Begin the Beguine" and other U.S. tunes.

In the evening, when the street was cool, the soldiers would sit and watch the Germans go by, or wrestle and play catch, while a loudspeaker on the Headquarters windowsill played swing.

Little kids hung around to shag the ball or retrieve a cigarette butt. They squashed the end that was still smoking, on the sidewalk, then carefully placed the remnant with the rest of their collection in a Camel package or other container they carried in their pockets.

One boy told us he had decided there must be a lot of chewing gum and cars in America.

The Battalion surgeon, Captain Lowe, was responsible for the sanitation and medical care of 10 Russian, Polish and Italian camps in the Lauf area. A system was set up under which enlisted men of the Medical Detachment held daily sick call for the DPs, and Lowe visited the 10 camps routinely. Supplies were brought from the captured enemy supply dump at Furth.¹⁰ T/3 Bergstrom recalled the DPs in the camps:

Of all the poverty-stricken people I have seen they were the poorest fed and most ill-clothed.

Teams of medics each morning took care of the more obvious needs to the best of their capability.

In the Polish camp to which I was assigned we found a couple of Polish teen-age girls who could speak German and Polish who we asked to be our interpreters. They spoke Polish to the persons responding to "sick call" while we tried to speak German to the girls to apply bandages, and they proved very helpful in caring for the ailing people.

One day one of the medics slapped one of the 17-year-old Amazons, our helper, on her posterior and she returned the compliment with a slap with the force of a motor pool six-ton wrecker truck. We later found out that she had worked as a slave laborer in a Russian steel mill since she was 12 years old.

Bergstrom was of the opinion she could have whipped a good share of the fellows in the 535th.

Bacil Jay Fisher remembered that he and other 535th men (Elmer Dale Goff was one he recalled) in addition to GIs from elsewhere helped convoy displaced persons from Plauen, which is about 85 miles directly northeast of Nurnberg, to Chemnitz (now Karl Marx Stadt) behind the Iron Curtain. The DPs were brought in by railroad cars, were sprayed with a fumigating material and were picked up by truck near an old aircraft hangar.

Fisher said the place where the DPs were hauled was decorated with small flags in a line, as far as could be seen-- United States flags on one side and Russian flags on the other. The Russians, little men carrying rifles, saluted each truck. The trucks circled into an area beyond the flags, and the DPs were unloaded at a railroad station. The

Americans remained in the trucks while this was taking place.

The B Battery men recall seeing trains moving in on an overhead railroad.

On one trip a woman about 80 years old rode in front with Fisher. She took out a small Bible and sat reading it, turning one page after another. When the truck near Chemnitz, where the long lines of flags and the Russian soldiers could be seen, Fisher tapped her on the shoulder. She took a long look, then turned a page to a certain passage, read it, kissed the small Bible and threw it out the truck window. Fisher said there was a white cross on the Bible and "it looked like it had been well used." The book was printed in a foreign language.

At this time, when Fisher was on the special detail, B Battery men were serving as MPs in Lauf, keeping order. They patrolled in command cars and jeeps.

The Germany edition of THE STARS AND STRIPES reported on June 10 that U.S. trucks hauling former prisoners and displaced persons to the Russians were only part of a great mass movement in Germany. American columns were rolling along highways day and night as combat divisions and service troops who had been spread all over north central Germany in the previous two months pulled back into the U.S. occupation zone. The quantity of traffic moving west for France was increasing too, and long slow convoys of Wehrmacht trucks were rolling, taking discharged POWs home.

On July 1, a group of 535th personnel left Lauf in a 2-1/2-ton truck on a sightseeing tour in southern Germany. Cpl. Art Imwalle, D Battery clerk who was with the group, said they were shown through the Dachau concentration camp by a Hungarian who had been incarcerated there, visited Oberammergau where the Passion play is held, went on to Innsbruck and rode in a cable car and lift to the top of the Alps. The following day the 535th group saw Brenner Pass, went up to Hitler's "Eagle Nest" at Berchtesgaden and viewed what remained of Hitler's and Goering's homes, in addition to a bathtub built especially for Goering, before returning to Lauf late on July 2.¹¹

The first big split-up of the 535th took place on July 4, 1945, when about 250 members of the battalion were transferred to the 353rd Searchlight Battalion, Corporal Imwalle who was with the departing troops, recorded that on July 8 he and others left Lauf for a community about 20 miles southeast of Bamberg.¹² While with the searchlight battalion, the men were informed that they would be sent to the United States, would get furloughs and then go on to Japan to fight in the war there. The unit practiced parading, as it was to be "a dress battalion" too, Imwalle recalled.

After the war with Japan ended in early August, a large bunch of the $35th men from the 353rd and other troops were sent to the 99th Division, Imwalle said. These men were shipped home through Marseille, arrived at Newport News, Va., and their unit was deactivated about this same time. So they were discharged and home while the bulk of the 535th men-- those with more points who had not been destined for the Pacific War-- remained in Europe with their battalion.

The 535th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion was relieved of its occupation duties on July 8 by the 777th AAA, and about 11:30 at night the 535th convoy began moving out of the Market place at Lauf.¹

Headlights of the trucks and other vehicles shone on the brick roads ahead, and on the many notices posted on bulletin boards in towns and villages.

Nurnberg, one of Germany's major cities, seemed to be nothing but walls, cement blocks and piles of rubble when we passed through. On a long bend further ahead, while the trucks jiggled and jarred us, we could see the convoy's lights back as far as a mile to a mile and one-half and more coming in sight all the time; this was a pretty sight. By wrapping a poncho around his head and shoulders, a GI could keep out the dust and cold, and looking through a slit in the poncho he could recognize Wurzburg when the convoy reached there. Wurzburg was full of burned-out buildings.

Daylight came and there was mist in the low places, but this cleared away. We passed through devastated Darmstadt and crossed the Rhine River at Oppenheim through the beautiful river valley lush with sunflowers, vegetable gardens, apple orchards and other flora, crowded together without a break.

From the Rhine we passed through lonely, forested country on the way to Trier. We got a 10-minute stop every two hours, and dined on K-rations for breakfast and dinner. Many other convoys also were headed westward out of Germany, and when we would stop, trucks full of American soldiers whizzed by, one after another.

On the evening of July 9 we bivouacked in a field near Trier with other battalions. We were hot and dirty and our eyes hurt after 16 hours in convoy but we knew we were getting closer to home. Washing in the nearby Moselle River helped somewhat, and after supper we stretched out in our bedrolls in crushed-down stubble and any other places that appeared convenient. In the morning we pulled out of bivouac at 6,

Luxembourg, further along, was the prettiest city we had seen since Liege the preceding autumn.

In France, when we reached there, the little kids waved and the mademoiselles stood by the road reminiscent of Liberation days, although their excitement now probably was mercenary to an extent. The soldiers threw out all the odds and ends of K-rations they had from breakfast-- lumps of sugar, crackers, concentrated cereal, coffee powder and bouillon-- and the French scrambled for these left-overs.

Many of the fellows felt better to be back in France, to see the black tams, the roads bordered by poplar trees, cafes instead of gasthauses, people carrying long, -bare loaves of bread under their arms, and French signs. Some of us who knew a smattering of French could translate the names of some village inns, such as the Black Cow, and St. Mary's of the Fields. The better-dressed mademoiselles had the Frenchtype glamour we first saw in Paris in the summer of 1944. The men waved back at the French.

Most of the communities we passed through on the plain of northern France were just collections of stone farm buildings, rather shabby.

At the place where the trucks began slowing down for a noon stop two little girls were standing, and one of them clapped her hands with joy. Soon more than a dozen youngsters were milling around asking for bonbons, chocolate, chewing gum, biscuits and cigarettes.

During our noon stop one of the GIs-- who had gone out nightly to a house in Lauf to teach a girl English and eat the pies baked by her mother, a nice old lady-- got into an argument with Van Arsdol about the respective merits of the French and Germans. He said the French were unappreciative of our efforts and were "crooks."' At the Lyon railway station when he was returning from the Riviera, a Frenchman charged GIs for drinking water until they got wise to him, the soldier said, and "booted" the Frenchman. A number of GIs had not wanted to leave their frauleins, and were not entirely happy to be back with the French.

The convoys moved on that day, rolled through Reims, and the 535th bivouacked for the night outside Soissons.

We rode on, next day, July 11, to Camp Philip Morris, a big redeployment tent camp five miles from downtown Le Havre, and the men were glad to hit’ the cots that night.

The 535th men who had mostly 70 to 90 deployment points-- the men with less than 70 already had been transferred out-- were told we probably would not be going home for months. We were to be trained to run one of the deployment camps.

Gangs of POWs at the camp were constructing new areas, and they worked hard. One group was clearing mines and bouncing Betties from the field next to our area, and we heard that three of the Germans had been killed in three days. That may have been the reason the ones laying walks and putting up huts and tents worked well-- they wanted to hang onto those jobs.

Germans had been used in the reconstruction of France for a number of months, and about the start of August a total of 300,000 of the prisoners were being used. Generally, they were under the supervision of the military. The French at this time were reported desirous of employing up to 2 million of the POWs in the Le Havre area and elsewhere in devastated sections of France.²

The Le Havre area of this period was called by one publication the place "where some men watch other men go home."

One-eighth of the men and materiel used by the United States and Britain to crush Germans had been shipped through this area, and a triangular section of 550 square miles between Le Havre, Rouen and St. Valery now had been set aside for redeployment activities. Great camps called Pall Mall, Lucky Strike, Home Run, Herbert Tareyton, Philip Morris, Old Gold and Twenty Grand had been established here-- "immense canvas cities" with their own utilities, theaters, hospitals and sections for receiving and administering the staging processes for embarking the troops.³

While at Camp Philip Morris, rifles and souvenir pistols had to be turned in. Colonel J.F. (Hank) Arthur, the new commanding officer, gave a talk about behaving when we moved into the camp at LeHavre.⁴

The Battalion moved into Le Havre on July 21 on a new job, guarding prisoners of war and taking them out on work details at port installations.

Headquarters Battery had reveille at 6 a.m., and the other batteries, which provided prisoner guards, rolled out earlier. The whistles started blowing about 5 and kept Headquarters men awake until 5:55 a.m., when they too started to crawl out. The Germans, who lived in a stockade next to the 535th, blew their own whistles and hollered in their language. This was a noisy place.

The 535th's assignment was described in detail by Captain Eugene Lash:

At that mission, we replaced a Negro Port Battalion, 1,200 men and 56 officers. There were two or three additional minor missions, one of which was the police and sanitation of the Le Havre Garbage Dump.

That was a staggering task. For hundreds of years the people at Le Havre had dumped their refuse on the shingle above the Seine, and it had been washed away by the tide. But after the Americans came, the city dump became a refuse pile from four to twenty feet in depth, three hundred yards long and one hundred yards wide, seething day and night with vermin of all description, the most evil of which were the licensed French scavengers, and a bulldozer had been put to work pushing the accumulated refuse over a low bluff, on the beach proper. But the job had not been completed, and there was no way to control the deposits of refuse which arrived late.

Well, Doc Lowe and I took a look at it, and he concurred with a Medic who had had some experience with a similar problem in Italy. The most logical permanent solution seemed to us to be to get a dragline to cover up the bluff of refuse that we were building out into the Seine. But no dragline could be made available to us, and we had to put up quite an argument to keep the bulldozer which still was at work. But we did keep the bulldozer, and, by keeping two men from the Medical Detachment at the dump to control the dumping of new refuse, we had the thing whipped within a week. Doc Lowe displayed great tact in building up the enthusiasm of his men for the garbage dump assignment.⁵

Captain Lowe said later that his month as CO of the dump might be called "a highlight" of his Army experience.

It was my duty to see that the garbage was dumped where it should be, that the hundreds of Frenchmen who came down to pick over the garbage did it in an orderly fashion, and that the stuff was finally covered with a layer of dirt.

Men of the 535th moved into a tent camp in a slum and industrial section of the city. Captain Lash stated:

It was not at all a bad area, except that it was indescribably filthy...We were all in tents...Rats as large as jackrabbits lived under the floor boards of the tents and under the floors of the mess halls. We took up all floor boards, removed the accumulated food and food wrappers, and under the mess halls, drained the accumulated liquid kitchen waste. We would have been able to drive out the rats altogether, I believe, if we had had some way to close the latrines. But as long as rats could come through the sewers to the latrines, we couldn't get rid of them. After we had been there a month, men still were being bitten by rats at night.⁶

In the evening the unwanted rodents could be seen scurrying from one tent to another, going under the boards. Sometimes at night they even ventured into the tents, and GIs heard them padding across the floors.

Lash recalled that the Negro unit had maintained an excellent officers' mess, and this was taken over by the 535th. The cooks were French civilians, working under reverse lendlease and were of the highest caliber, the captain said. Three had been employed on ocean liners, and the barman had worked in the Crillon before the war. Captain Lash also commented:

All of the good meat, condiments, coffee and other things that we had missed with the Armies were there at Le Havre in abundance. Each week Neff sent back to the QM Depot a truckload of surplus food, including coffee, sugar, lard and flour. We ate there as we had never eaten since leaving the States...

But this again was only part of the picture, and Lash observed that considerable worry was caused by the racial problem and black marketing in Le Havre:

When we arrived in Le Havre, we broke up a tremendous black market. The Negroes, German prisoners and French civilians, all of them working together, were milking the port supply installations of tremendous quantities of supplies. Entire cases of clothing, food, yes, food above all, and PX supplies disappeared between the cargo slings and the depot. In the huge Postal Regulating Station, in a pile of mail bags about 600 yards long and perhaps 100 yards wide, our guards discovered nine rifled mail bags the first night, apprehended the Krauts who had opened the bags, and that was the end of that.

So it was in other installations. Our men found thievery, stopped it, and made enemies. Most of the Service troops at the Port were colored, and considerable antagonism developed.

One man from our outfit, a cook from D Battery, was shot and killed, without provocation, within 50 yards of the entrance to our area, and within sight of a half dozen white Americans. The vehicle number was turned over to the Military Police, but the murderer was never apprehended, even though there was a dispatch showing that that vehicle was in the city of Le Havre at that hour.

Sergeant Little was walking from a GI movie, a half mile from our area, when he was shot at from a civilian vehicle driven by Negro troops. McCarley, from C Battery, was set upon by three civilians and two Negroes, and slashed, with a knife, from ear to ear, but not deeply. Before he let them get away, he killed one of his assailants with his bare hands, and beat two of the

others very badly. That incident took place within sight of a Military Police patrol, and McCarley was exonerated.

The captain described discipline within the 535th when it was made up still of men from the old outfit as "superior to any unit with which we had the misfortune to deal." He informed Colonel Francis, who had left the unit in Germany, that he would have been "quite proud" of the 535th before it absorbed the personnel of an immobilized field artillery battalion.

Lash said that Colonel Arthur "had a lot of respect for the outfit which he took over, and before he left it, the outfit had a lot of respect for him."

The captain added:

Although our duties were onerous, there were plenty of men for the job, and every possible effort was made to provide the men with recreation. Passes and leaves were available for us there in quantities of which we had never before dreamed...In addition we arranged for the use of a small hotel at Deauville as an enlisted men's leave center. There were not, at that time, other American troops there...A very beautiful arrangement until General Koenig, Chanor Base Section commander, heard of it. He took it over as a leave center for CBS officers...⁷

Le Havre had been heavily damaged during the war. Of 20,000 pre-war buildings, only about 8,000 still were standing, according to a civic official. As early as mid-June 1944 it was stated that high priority was attached to RAF bombing of Le Havre as the city sheltered one of Germany's largest fleet of E-boats. The city had been bombed 140 times by U.S. and RAF planes, with the heaviest raid on Sept. 5 just before British troops liberated the city. Before surrender, the Nazi commander ordered wholesale destruction of the port facilities. And even as they went down to defeat, the Germans were spreading propaganda in Le Havre. They informed the French that the final heavy bombing attack of the RAF was not for any military object but to insure that Le Havre would never be able to compete with Southampton again for the large traffic of the transAtlantic liners. The French said that 3,500 persons were killed and 1,500 wounded in the last raid that took place after the Germans had departed. Allied shell fire also had damaged the city.⁸

The city had a normal population of 170,000. At the start of November 1944 only 40,000 remained, but the number had been picking up-- the populace totaled 80,000 in the month before the 535th arrived.⁹

Much construction was under way at Le Havre. The French salvaged good bricks from wrecked buildings and were putting up long, one-story buildings that had somewhat of a California appearance. The town needed a paint job in a bad way; a few buildings were being painted in bright colors, such as red and green.

We could board a streetcar a block and one-half from camp and ride to downtown Le Havre, a big but rather dull place, full mostly of artillery and anti-aircraft men, with numerous other GIs, sailors and merchant marines. Two American movies and a Red Cross club providing coffee and doughnuts free were among the few points of interest. Many engineers who had come in on the Normandy assault and stayed back in France were stationed at Le Havre, and they fought D-Day over again verbally in the cafes of Le Havre.

People of Le Havre were very cool to the Americans, and it angered many GIs, especially after the reception they had gotten from the frauleins. The contrast was sharp too between Le Havre and the reception we received from many of the people in England and in still-friendly Liege when we got passes that summer and fall. It wasn't pleasant to see the people of the U.S. and France fall out and at first a GI could tell himself that the Le Havre residents were not much cooler than those at Wilmington, N. Car., near Camp Davis-- that city too had been crowded with GIs.

But there was no getting around the fact of the massive destruction in the old part of the city near the quays, resulting from Allied bombardments. In addition to the unfavorable aspects of so many soldiers being crowded into this port city, there were various nationalistic understandings, the difference in language for instance. When the GI heard the French mention Americans in their talk, he could imagine they were saying nasty things about us.

Waiting for a streetcar downtown, two soldiers wearing the 9th Infantry Division shoulder patch were talking. One who was fairly drunk had gotten in a mixup with a Frenchman in a cafe and had knocked him out-- now he was defending himself for the brawl. He asked:

What did he smile at me for, then?

The other infantryman said:

He didn't mean anything. He didn't understand you. You don't understand this Frog language, do you?

He told his fighting friend that the MPs were about to take him in, but he talked the lieutenant out of such a plan. The explanation:

I saw he was an infantry MP so I said we'd just come down off the line and you was a psycho case.

He showed the inebriated soldier that some of his knuckles were skinned.

As a great army continued to break up at Le Havre, as thousands of soldiers moved through to board ship, the 535th men were spectators at a variety of unusual scenes, vivid, sometimes startling, at times not so pretty, the backwash of a vast war. Two small samples:

Two low-type characters, a man and a woman, leaning against a bar, sized up some Negroes who were sitting at tables drinking beer. The man indicated one to the female and they went over and sat down with the GI. The woman seemed to be trying to deal with the Negro. (Some soldiers complained about Negroes going with white women, but the Negroes did not seem to be having such a picnic, going mostly with a few old gals who seemed out after money and supplies mainly.)

A merchant marine sold a thin sweater to an old lady for 400 francs ($8) and bragged that the garment had cost only $1.49. His pal was down to undershirt and pants. He said he had come to town all dressed up and had been selling his clothes for high prices.

Pfc. Fred Staab recalled that during the time the 535th was stationed at Le Havre and the men were taking details of German prisoners out to work on docks and warehouses, an order was received to take 300 to 400 prisoners to Liege.

The detail consisting of around 15 or more GIs and the prisoners headed by Captain Hughes arrived by train in Liege on a Thursday noon. On Saturday morning at 8 the GIs were supposed to meet at the former second platoon CP.

"I had always been with the first platoon, so I went to the first platoon, not thinking I should have been at the second platoon," Staab said. He also remembered:

I waited for some time but no one showed up. Finally it dawned on me I should be at the second platoon so I walked leisurely down to the second platoon and here was our outfit all waiting for me. The captain says, "What time is it, Staab?"

I looked at my watch and said, "Nine o'clock, sir."

He said, "What time were you supposed to be down here?"

I said, "Eight o'clock, sir."

The captain asked, "Well, where have you been?" "Well, I got a little mixed up," I told him. "I thought we were supposed to meet at the first platoon." Captain Hughes said: "Staab, you worry me. Here I'm supposed to be a young man and just look at all the lines I've got in my face."¹⁰

The Aug. 7 edition of the STARS AND STRIPES from London carried a story headlined "U.S. Reveals Atom Bomb Used First Time on Japs." This new bomb, according to the story, had a greater punch than 20,000 tons of TNT, and the enemy had been warned that "all above ground will be wasted." Another story on Aug. 7 was headlined:

About 1 a.m. Aug. 15, GIs who had been sleeping in the tent camp were awakened by other soldiers yelling and by ship whistles blowing in the port. We knew the end of the war had been announced. The Navy was shooting flares and red tracers in the air, and most of the 535th men went outside to watch. Some of the Motor Pool fellows came through Headquarters tents and wrestled and shook the GIs still in bed. They passed around bottles of cognac.

In the days following, the fellows in the camp were more cheerful, and you could hear them singing and whistling frequently. Many rumors were circulating about when we would be relieved and sent to a marshalling area.

Pfc. Gordon Post, a driver, and Van Arsdol took six GIs to the Austerlitz railway station in Paris to catch a special train for Biarritz, the Army University on the Bay of Biscay near Spain. Post and Van Arsdol looked for a parking lot afterward in Paris, and a soldier led them to a Quartermaster parking lot on the Isle of St. Germaine in the Seine. That GI "guide" and other soldiers talked together about their black market activities and how they could not afford to be caught. One offered to buy the tarp of the weapons carrier, and also asked if the 535th men would fill their empty five-gallon gas cans down the road so he could buy them.

Van Arsdol went out that night and stood on a stone bridge near the lot and looked down the river toward the heart of Paris.

four or five miles away. The Eiffel Tower was lit up, and a couple of searchlights could be seen in the sky. Big guns sounded off now and then, for this was VJ (Victory over Japan) night. Crickets chirped on the riverbanks, and the lights of the sidewalk cafe near the end of the bridge were reflected in the river. Music drifted from the cafe.

Van Arsdol walked into the cafe and drank some vin blanc. Next to him stood a soldier who was with the Quartermasters but formerly had been with an armored division. He told of all the people he was going to "slug" if he saw them, including his first sergeant. He was apprehended once for carrying a gun, and an MP nearly caught him on a recent day with a stolen jeep.

"I'm in business, sergeant," he said he told the MP. "If I didn't get it someone else would."

Two soldiers walked in, both with sleeves rolled up, and one had his shirttail out and wore a red fez. They were planning to fight the "guineas" (Italian service troops) who were dancing with French girls in the ballroom adjacent to the cafe. The girls were excited and Frenchmen stood in the dark street looking in. Van Arsdol's new acquaintance rolled up his sleeves to help them, but the fight did not materialize.

With this type of characters wandering around and the talk about stealing and selling, Van Arsdol began to worry about the weapons carrier so he went back and slept in it that night instead of going downtown.

The day of the return to Le Havre was sunny. Van Arsdol had never seen anyone in the Army as fond of anything as the 20-year-old Post and his weapons carrier, No. 14. "Don't think I ain't proud of this little baby," he remarked. It was nice riding along the poplar-lined highway by the Seine, passing through old French villages, with the vehicle's tarp flapping a little in the wind.

"Why can't I go on like this forever?" Post asked.

Le Havre and its people seemed shabby, after the visit to Paris. And the residents of the port city seemed even colder now. The Parisians had been fairly cool, but were more friendly than the people of Le Havre.

A headline in the Aug. 18 London edition of the STARS AND STRIPES announced:

In late August about half of our outfit was composed of men from the old 535th and the rest were from a Seventh Army searchlight battalion. There was nothing but rumors about when the Battalion might move.

A few of the officers with most points had been transferred out by the start of September to be shipped home, but the enlisted men were still there, and were getting impatient.

On Sept. 2, rain fell on the 535th's tents in the night, and it was fine to lie in bed all dry and sheltered and just listen.

When the thunder rumbled a bit, we could hear again in memory the guns of Normandy-- the June and early July battles had not been far west of Le Havre-- and of the Falaise Gap and the Bulge. We would hear a distant rumble of thunder, then a closer explosion or two. The noise brought back the war mood, the uncertainty of each day, hour and even, at times, minute.

Through the front openings in the canvas doors, we could see lightning, like gun flashes.

Passes were being given out for visits to England and to places on the continent, and some of the highest-point men were moving out, while replacements were being shipped in to our 535th. The 90-pointers had left us by mid-September. Our morale was not helped when we learned that the 535th's low-point men, who had entered the army three to six months later than us, already were home,¹¹ and that many 70-pointers were coming down from Germany and leaving for the U.S. because they came under an Army quota and not under a Chanor Base Section quota, such as covered us. But we heard that was being stopped.

The STARS AND STRIPES arriving daily kept the fellows in a turmoil with the latest redeployment news:

In late September, General of the Army Eisenhower had 2,500,000 men in Europe, and planned to ship out all but 700,000 by Jan. 1, keeping 400,000 for policing Germany and 300,000 for cleaning up salvage and supply depots.¹²

Some of the 535th troops decided that they were a "lost" battalion. Twenty-six of them signed a Sept. 28 letter that was sent to the CHICAGO TRIBUNE and was printed under the heading "They Want to be Found."

The letter stated that the battalion had the job handling German POWs in Le Havre. It told in brief of the activities of the 535th from the D-Day landings through various later actions, and mentioned that the unit had received five battle stars, the bronze arrowhead (for the Normandy assault), numerous bronze stars, a lot of Purple Hearts, and some men had been killed in action. The letter concluded:

This netted the outfit no less than 78 points, and some go as high as 126.

We work in a port area, and naturally have close contact with those going home, practically all with less points than ourselves. Today we learn that there is no prospect of our being relieved. "There just aren't replacements."

Are the men who set foot in France on D-Day going to be the last to be sent home at the conclusion of the occupation? We are one of the lost battalions, and we wish to be found.

MEN OF THE 535TH A.A.A. BATTALION (26 signatures).¹³

The men with 80 to 92 points, including most of what remained of the old 535th, left on Oct. 23, some for Liege, most for Rouen. The number of the old gang in the Battalion had dwindled since the end of the war from 750 to not quite 100. Those remaining had 78 or 79 points, except for half-a-dozen 80-pointers left off the last list by mistake.

We had nearly 400 new men, or we would not have been able to handle much POW guard.

But as the make-up of the Battalion had changed, there had been a corresponding shift in general attitude, for the 535th was, as Captain Lash observed, "a new outfit under an old name" and the newer members did not have the same attitude on discipline. Some of the men and officers who came to the 535th had arranged comfortable black markets, of which they boasted. Lash described the 535th as "altogether a route-order outfit when I left it." But he did state that personnel who came to the 535th from the 353rd Searchlight Battalion, before the 535th left Germany, included "some exceptional men and officers" who were so trained and experienced that they soon found their places in the Battalion and did their jobs well.¹⁴

Duties of the guards remained about the same despite the transition. Pfc. Koerber's records indicate typical activity of this variety. On Oct. 23, from 4 to 8 a.m. and 4 to 8 p.m., he was a tower guard on Stockade No. 2. Next day he was guarding 36 prisoners on War Shipping Administration duty, and on Oct. 25 he was with 12 POWs at the QM Laundry and later on guard at the tower.¹⁵

Le Havre was put "off limits" to GIs in early November, except for soldier places such as the theaters, Red Cross and the Gangplank Service Club. The trouble leading up to the action had been building up for a considerable time. We didn't know the detailed reasons for the Frenchmen's complaints, but as early as September it was reported by NEWSWEEK magazine that Frenchmen griped about GI drunkenness and rowdiness, and tended to blame the black market, shortages of food, coal, clothing, housing, hotel and office space, high prices-- in fact, everything "but the weather"-- on U.S. troops, and the French press added fire to the difficulties with stories.¹⁶

No real solution was believed possible except to get the GIs out of France. Lt. Col. K.G. Pavey, provost marshal of the Seine section, reported a "general increase in disorders," and lowering of discipline in all Allied armies in varying degree. The average GI and Frenchman just did not like each other, he pointed out.¹⁷

No "good girl" associated with a GI in Le Havre, or she would not keep her reputation long if she did. When a girl walked down the street with an American, the French turned and stared. Otherwise they would hardly look at us.

Le Havre was a rough town, with numerous fights, venereal disease, black market and some killings. About the start of November, a month had elapsed since one of our men had been wounded but there were so many cafes and other troublecenters in the city that much other difficulty could happen without us hearing about it. Frequently we saw a MP armored car with half a dozen MPs on the vehicle, speeding down the street with its siren whining, and often, lying in bed, we could hear the siren wail as the wagon raced through the city to the scene of new action.

A huge black market flourished in Le Havre. Most of the laborers wore one or more pieces of GI clothing. Civilians smoked American cigarettes almost exclusively, and more French, seemingly, than Americans were chewing gum. In a Le Havre barber shop patronized by GIs all of the shaving soap was PX type. One of the brisket black markets centered along a block on the Cours de la Republique. People moved along the sidewalk like quicksand, loitering in ones and twos, then gathering in groups of four or five, then breaking up again. A Frenchman there might inquire of a soldier if his shirt was for sale, indicating this by plucking at the shirt. Another Frenchman on a typical day was buying shoes from a U.S. merchant marine, and a third was asking a soldier if he had cigarettes for sale. In small groups, the buyers and sellers haggled over prices. When a soldier looked over the perfume, handkerchiefs and small models of the Arc de Triomphe at a souvenir stand, a man asked in a low voice if he had any American or English money for sale.

A GI could buy a carton of cigarettes at the PX for 40 francs and sell it to a Frenchman for 500 francs ($10). Two soldiers who were in the 535th camp walked in from pass barefooted; they apparently had sold their shoes.

Cafes had been main black markets in Le Havre because GIs congregated there. These were among the places banned for the soldiers in early November.

The author of BATTALION FROM THE MOJAVE was standing in the dark back compartment of the No. 4 tram going back to camp on Nov. 1, and at one of the stops there was a commotion at the front of the vehicle.

Two girls entered the tram from the front and hurried to the back where Van Arsdol was standing with several civilians. They were laughing but they seemed a little scared too. They were followed by a little old man, then a small fat Negro soldier. The girls and old man stood near the 535th GI, and the Negro, appearing somewhat intoxicated, said to the girls:

You don't lie to me. You tell me the truf.

He moved his head so that a side of his face was in the light from the tram's center compartment, and declared:

Look, I'm an American Indian. An American Indian. We get off together.

The old man was standing between him and the girls.

"Look good at me," the GI said, turning his head again. "I'm an American Indian."

About that time the tram stopped and Van Arsdol got off.

On Nov. 9 the remnants of the "old" 535th-- new men continued to guard the POWs at Le Havre-- were moved to Camp Lucky Strike, a desolate installation about 45 miles from Le Havre, and we waited in leaky tents for a number of days for other soldiers gathering from all parts of Belgium and northwestern France. Chanor base headquarters told us that we would be on the boat by Dec. 1.

Lucky Strike was just a place to leave behind as quickly as possible, and a news writer also was not especially impressed by the general area on a visit about the same time:

Acres and acres of mud, bare blasted trees, rows and rows of khaki-colored tents, dugouts and Nissen huts--this is the picture of the U.S. Army's Chanor Base--where American soldiers await redeployment home and German prisoners of war work for them.¹⁸

The troopship West Point which some of us boarded at the end of November was packed with soldiers, mostly quartered below deck in bunks that were hung in crowded tiers; even the promenade deck was lined along one wall with numerous cots to handle the overflow of soldiers. Some of the soldiers on the cots were playing cards, and otherwise sitting on the floor, playing cards on a blanket, field jacket or magazine, using poker chips or matchsticks in place of money, because gambling was prohibited on the ship.

After going out the door that led to the open deck, the author of BATTALION FROM THE MOJAVE leaned against the rail of the West Point when we were one day out from Le Havre, looked at the big waves, and thought of the past and the future.

Had it only been a year and one-half since that English spring, which had been so deceptively beautiful, with its greenery and blossoms and sunshine? Already what had happened in between was starting to take on something of the nature of a dream. Behind us, beyond the horizon, was the old life, great moments and great scenes, D-Day on Utah Beach, the liberation of Paris, the days in Liege and Germany. Now the men of the 535th were scattered, most of the fellows were home already, and one of the last-- Van Arsdol-- was alone at the ship rail, in the stiff wind blowing in from the Atlantic. This writer thought of the boys who had made a one-way trip across the ocean, and especially of the vast American cemetery in Belgium near the German border that he had seen the previous February in a cold rain, and the German POWs digging many more holes under the supervision of Negro soldiers.

New troops were continuing guard duties with the 535th in Le Havre and after the unit was deactivated in Germany in the following year the Battalion of the World War II period would no longer exist except in memory. Yet the 535th and Europe always would remain a part of all of us who had crossed the Channel into the Atlantic Wall and beyond in the last phase of World War II.