All of a sudden, the need for more troops came up and the Congress cut off the (education) budget. So
they picked up all of the ASTP boys and put them into the infantry. That’s why they called it Scholars
in Foxholes; for example, the unit that I eventually ended up in, the 104th Division which was a very
good Division, probably a third of the unit was college kids and the other half was uneducated
Southerners (laugh). We had this mixture of people which was really interesting. I ended up in the
104th Division and we ended up in Europe.
When we left the University they sent us then to Fort Benning, GA. We did our ASTP basic training
(there). For a person who grew up in a very small town, who had never been on a train, it was
interesting because the train trip took a whole week from Fort Lewis to Fort Benning. We’d stop and
let other trains by and we just kind of rambled across the country and finally ended up in Columbus,
Georgia, where Fort Benning is. I always pictured the South as being warm and hospitable. You get
there in December. It’s cold and terrible. It rained so hard they lined the gutters with concrete. It rains
there in torrents. About half of the outfit got pneumonia. It was sure a lot different than I pictured
Georgia.
We were there a couple months I suppose and then they sent all of us ASTP guys to the 86th Division
which was in Louisiana. It was a miserable outfit. It was terrible. We were down there in the swamps.
We’d take those hundred mile hikes through the swamps. Actually the Division was thought of so
poorly by McArthur and Eisenhower that when it came time for us to go overseas they didn’t want us.
We were worn out. So then they broke the outfit up and sent the group I was in to the 104th. That’s
when I joined the 104th. The 86th was actually reassembled and they tried to improve it. They actually
got to Europe late. They got there right at the end of the war. But I was glad to get out of that outfit.
We were still ASTP, but then we joined the 104th. We pretty much went across the northern half of
Europe. The Army was divided into different armies; there was the 1st Army, the 3rd, 5th, 9th and the
15th Army. (Art goes to shelf and gets a map). If you look at a map of Europe in the war, the 1st
Army went this way (sweeping his arm across northern Europe from France into Germany), and the
3rd Army, which was Patton’s, was further south. The 7th army was clear down (south) and came in
from Marseille. It was the 1st Army that actually landed on Omaha Beach and then they’re the ones
that came right on across (the continent). The 104th was in the 1st (Army). We had a very colorful
Division Commander, General Terry Allen. This is a book about him, Terrible Terry Allen2. Terry Allen
was known as the finest combat commander in World War II.
I myself landed on Omaha Beach. In the beginning we didn’t do anything outstanding but then the
supply lines got too long and the Army needed to open up the port of Antwerp so that their supply lines
were shorter, because right now the supplies were coming all from the French beaches in Normandy,
clear across. Eisenhower had a lot of problems with Montgomery because he just couldn’t seem to get
his bat off his shoulder. Eisenhower sent our division to open up the port of Antwerp, which we did.
When we got through with it, they pulled us down to Aachen and then we were first going into
Germany. That’s where the Siegfried Line was. The interesting point there was that we went up and
replaced the unit that was there and our company commander went back to have a conference on what
we were going to do. When he came back he said, “Well, the Army line has become static because our
supply lines are too long and they’ve decided that the 1st Army is the one that’s going to go off first.
Second Corp is going to be the first of the 1st Army that’s going to go off and the 104th is going to
lead off the attack, and guess which company is going up the hill first.” (laugh) - K Company and L
Company, which was our company so we were the first ones at the Battle of Hill 287. Our mission
was to secure this.
Hill 287 was a key to the Siegfried Line. They said,” Don’t worry because the Air Force is going have a
heavy concentration of bombing and neutralize that hill before we got up.” They were going to fly over
about 11:00 a.m. and what they did was they flew over but they didn’t drop any bombs. They just
dropped tinfoil. That was done to knock out their air defense equivalent of radar. Behind this hill was
the heavy industrial area of Eschweiler. They wanted to knock out the air defense (laugh) which meant
we really didn’t have any help at all. They thought we’d accomplish our mission in a couple of hours.
Well, in a couple of days we hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards.
We had pretty good losses. But we eventually conquered Hill 287. From there we went down into the
Eschweiler area. Just past Eschweiler was another industrial area called Weisweiler. We were going to
make a night attack from our position here (pointing to a point on desk) across this beet field. They
raised sugar beets there. This beet field was about a half a mile across, till we got to the City of
Weisweiler. We began our attack just when it was starting to get dark. We no sooner got started and
the Company Commander says to affix bayonets (laugh). I thought, “Oh hell, (laugh) this is going to be
worse than I thought it is.” Anyway, we got across and got our mission accomplished without too
much difficulty.
About midnight, the three company commanders decided we needed to get together and decide what
we’re going to do next. There are three rifle companies in a battalion. We were down in this “fruit
cellar” like basement of this big apartment complex. The Germans counterattacked our apartment
complex. They were on us before we knew it and we all got captured. What they did was throw hand
grenades down into us. So the Germans took us all out into the street behind the building. We started
doing our march to the rear, to the German rear. They had about twenty-five of us. They hit our CP,
which was our command post. They captured all three company commanders and their essential
nucleus of staff. Some of them were pretty badly wounded, including this Chinese fellow. We just had
one Chinese fellow in our unit. He had about twenty five wounds in him. He was just really all shot up.
So this other guy, by the name of Pierce, and I carried this Chinese fellow. We couldn’t keep up with
the main party. We were carrying this guy and the rest of them were on ahead of us so they broke the
group of us into two. Most of the Germans guards and our prisoners were ahead. The three of us were
back here (illustrating with hands and fingers on the desk) and they left two or three German guards
with us. We eventually got to a German hospital. They were so busy patching up their own wounded
that I couldn’t get anybody to patch up Lee, because he needed medical treatment. I finally just helped
myself to necessary bandages and stuff to clean him up with. I took care of him myself. We left the
hospital and continued on to the German rear. We’d walked a long distance.
Eventually we were way up the line on the way to the German prison camps and we happened to run
into an artillery barrage that came in. What it was and where it came from I don’t know. Everybody
ducked for cover. The three of us got in the basement of this old relic of a house, hid in the coal bin.
We figured the German guards would come back and get us at any moment. We waited and we waited
and we waited. We waited through the night, the next day and the next night and they never did show
up so we just stayed where we were. Eventually we could hear some noise outside. We didn’t know if
it was Germans or our people or what it was. A very common tactic in those days was you’d kick in
the door and then throw a grenade down in the basement to kill off whoever is down there. When we
heard this door crash upstairs we start yelling in case it was Americans so they didn’t throw a grenade
down in there. It happened to be an American patrol. We eventually got back to our own unit. This
was just before the Bulge.
Our unit, the 104th, was a very strong unit and accomplished their missions much before most units
did. Some units had a strong leader and did well, some didn’t. We were lucky that we got as far as we
did. We got to the Roer River. When you get to a river, it’s a barrier. You have to figure out how to get
across that river. They actually hit our Corps. We were able to hold them off all during the Bulge. We
didn’t lose any ground, but the unit right along side us went back about twenty miles. They really got it.
The 104th held our ground at the Battle of the Bulge. They didn’t push us back but they pushed the
unit along side of us for miles.
We were cold all of the time. It’s hard for a civilian to visualize. We never wore an overcoat. An
overcoat was what we shot at because the Germans wore long overcoats and at night or in poor
visibility if you saw an overcoat that meant you were a German and that’s what you shot at. During the
Bulge we got a bunch of replacements up to replace the men we’d lost. By that time they were pulling
everybody up they could. One of the people that came up was an Air Corps Master Sergeant. When he
came up to our outpost, where we were, it was dead of winter. I told him,” Sergeant, we don’t wear
overcoats up here. Just throw your overcoat over there in a heap. We shoot at overcoats.” What we
did was assign the different replacements to platoons that were in outposts from where we were. On
the way out he picked up his overcoat, unbeknownst to us, because he thought it was cold out there,
(thinking to himself ),”I’m going to get my overcoat back.” On the way back it was the middle of the
night and one of our platoons out there saw this silhouette going across in an overcoat and they shot
him and killed him. He just didn’t pay attention (laugh). But, that was an interesting period. Our mission
at night was to wade the river and go over into the German side and get a prisoner and bring him back
so we could interview him and see what was going on, try to get some information out of him. We
didn’t have white camouflage outfits so what we’d do was take a sheet and put it over ourselves so we
were white. We’d wade the river and try to infiltrate the German lines to find a prisoner and bring him
back.
My duty, at that time, was radioman. I carried the radio for the Captain. We had two kinds of radios.
One was a walkie-talkie which was used mainly between our own platoon leaders. The main radio for
communication from us to battalion headquarters was what we called “300 Radio” and it was a big
back pack. You carried it like you had a back pack. It had a long aerial on it. The people that were with
the Captains were mainly support people, mainly runners and radio men. In a rifle company you have
three means of communication. You use radios when you could, when they would work and what not.
You’d use wire, which were telephones. We’d run telephone wire. We had an Army telephone at this
end and this end (pointing to different spots on the desk in front of him). The third kind was runners.
Runners are soldiers that are assigned to take the message from here to here (points at two different
spots on the table in front of him), which is a very dangerous job. Each of these kinds had problems.
Wire has its problems because the Germans would cut your wire and then you had to go out and find
where it was cut and repair it, hoping there wouldn’t be anyone there waiting for you (laugh). Radios
had their problems too because they weren’t as sophisticated as they are today.
