Combat Duty Begins

We found that most German civilians living in rural areas, e.g., farmers, had very well stocked food-cellars, comprising preserved fruit jams, some expropriated French wines, brandies and Dutch (Bols) liqueurs, kegs of beer, many preserved meats in the form of "wursten", etc. Also, we noticed that most city dwellers did not look undernourished considering the number of pot-bellied people we observed! I thought of Gilberte in Pavilly who told me the German Army had taken every cow, pig, chicken, sack of grain, sugar beets and potatoes, bottle of wine and hard cider, etc., they could find and then seized every freight car and locomotive they could find to transport every last stitch of edibles back to Germany! Actually, they continually stripped Northern France on a regular basis from the end of 1940 onwards! This made me feel better about our taking the money from the small town bank in Germany!

Strangely, there was no German resistance when we crossed the Nahe River? We discovered a large brewery in the city of Kirn-am-Nahe! Not a single person was in the brewery! All the pumps were shut down, etc., but the lights were still "lit", etc. We found vats and kegs full of all kinds of beer. We found that they had also made a greenish colored "sweet" beer especially for children, as a substitute for milk (?). I tasted it and realized it was non-alcoholic! We found the brewery's biochemistry lab intact where one GI grabbed a beautiful brown wooden case which had a large professional Carl Zeiss-Jena microscope in it? I wondered if, and how, that guy would ever get it home? Surprisingly, not too many guys were interested in drinking the beer because it was warm! I guess all the GI's were used to drinking cold beer like when we were "stateside"!

As we traveled eastward, we noticed that there were hundreds of dead horses lying on, or alongside, the roads, mostly still in their traces, and still tied to the overturned Wehrmacht artillery pieces and ammunition caissons, having been inadvertently killed by the strafing planes of our XIXth Tactical Air Command! I hadn't even thought of horses in connection with the German forces, always thinking of them as armored, mechanized or motorized, but realized now that a majority of the heavy artillery equipment, etc., was horse-drawn, probably because most of the gasoline had been allocated to the Panzers and the Luftwaffe? I assumed that most of the dead horses had been pushed off the roads by our 4th Armored Division tanks? Most were bloated with carbon dioxide, from the fermenting contents in their stomachs (?), lying on their sides with their legs sticking stiffly outwards. We were warned not to linger while looking at them because every once in a while they would explode after lying in the warm sun, and it might make us a sorry, and smelly, sight!! I felt truly sad about these innocent, beautiful animals who'd been sacrificed by the Nazis!

Early one day, although we were in "ready reserve", we were ordered to emplace our AT gun to guard a particular crossroads against a possible Panzer attack! We noticed that a farmyard nearby contained a very large number of about 50 (?) white chickens strutting about. The CPL went across the road, entered the yard and began shooting chickens with his M1 carbine! A buxom, middle-aged woman burst out of the front door of the house and began screaming in German, something like, "Nicht schiessen meine hünhchen..." I immediately ran across the road, into the yard, and told the CPL to stop shooting till I could negotiate, showed the farmwife 5 -100 mark banknotes and asked if she could make a nice roast chicken dinner, 1 chicken per soldier, complete with baked potatoes, for all 12 of us, and we would pay her 500 marks in real German money! Seeing the money in my hand she broke out into a smile and said, "Yes", actually "Ja doch!" and asked the Corporal not to shoot any more chickens as she would take care of everything, and invited the 2 of us to come inside her home for a drink of "schnapps" (German brandy) which we accepted. I also told her we'd have to eat in 2 shifts of 6 soldiers each, as we had to stand guard with our AT gun (Abwehrpanzerkanone). Actually, this worked out just as well because her old oak table couldn't seat more than 8 people. She agreed and told us it would take about 3 hours to prepare the chickens and complete everything using her huge, ancient coal-fired baking oven and would come to the door and wave to us when all was ready! Everything worked out fine that afternoon because she was an excellent cook and although we were ordered to "move out" before the second shift had finished their meal, they took their chicken wrapped in scraps of old newspaper and ate it enroute. The farmwife bid me goodbye and mentioned that she could use the money because she had 2 kids, a 13 year old and an 11 year old, who were hiding from us, and that her husband had been killed in Russia. Was she just a good person or was she a Nazi hiding her true self just for the money? A little later, some riflemen from "G" Company walking alongside our truck asked us where we'd gotten the chicken? We told them we'd overtaken a German Army (Wehrmacht) Field Kitchen who had surrendered and let us have their roast chickens!...to which another rifleman quipped, "Hah! Maybe we're on the wrong side if those Krauts are eating roast chicken in combat?"