Combat Duty Begins

Another scout and myself were directed by our Battalion CO to use a two-story barn near the edge of a town as an OP to see if any enemy soldiers were inside the town and then were to report back to Battalion HQ as we had no sound-power phone with us. (It would have been too far, and too slow, to reel out so much wire in mostly open fields, from 2nd BN HQ near a farmhouse about 3/4 of a mile from the edge of town.) An artillery forward-observer, a 1st Lieutenant, although uninvited, had followed us and entered the barn behind us. He came up the wooden stairway and insisted on looking through the chinks in the hayloft wall, while wearing his eyeglasses and facing towards the sun, not thinking that the reflected sparkle of his glasses in the sunshine, might be seen by some German artillery observers, who I suspected might be located, in a direction of 2 o'clock, in the steeple of the town church hardly more than 200 yards away! I swore at him for being so stupid and told him "we should get the hell out of here before a German shell would destroy the barn, and all of us with it!", while I pushed him down the stairs, he threatened to have me "court-martialed" for insubordination! I said if that's the way you feel you can stay but let me and my buddy pass! Of course, he didn't stay but kept on running out of the barn with me and the other scout behind him, and after we were about 15 or 20 feet from the barn I shouted "Hit the dirt"! As if to reinforce my original argument, the barn was hit by a German 80mm mortar bomb from somewhere inside the town, about a couple of seconds after we'd "hit the dirt", and demolished a good portion of the top of the barn, sending a tremendous shower of heavy wooden debris, and big globs of hay down upon the ground, which, luckily, didn't hit, or hurt, us! The lieutenant simply got up and ran off without thanking me for the "combat survival" lesson I had just given him? I thought to myself that 'not all our enemies' were wearing German uniforms! Of course, the threatened court-martial never came true! Also, I knew such an arrogant officer couldn't have graduated from the USMA!

I remember a firefight where one of our medics, who crawled out to help a wounded German lying on the ground after the other Germans had fallen back behind a row of bushes, was killed by a rifle shot through his helmet which had come from the very group of about 20 Germans we were fighting against! We dearly loved our medics, who we considered more brave than ourselves because they did their job while completely unarmed, so much so that our collective anger instantaneously flared up to so high a pitch that, without saying anything to each other, we all concentrated our rifle fire and ruthlessly shot as many as we could till the remaining 4 or 5 had by now stood up with raised hands loudly begging, "Nicht schiessen, kameraden!" We stopped shooting and took them prisoner. I secretly wondered if, and which one of them, had fired the shot which had killed our medic? Or had it been one of the Germans we'd already killed? We'll never know!

We crossed the Rhine at St. Goarshausen. While we were mid-river in DUKW's we came under heavy German artillery fire, some DUKW's suffered direct hits and near-direct hits; some men were killed; some men were wounded; we had no artillery support (to maintain an element of surprise?) but did have some smoke generators, but as usual, 'poetic justice' saw to it that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction; we then came under heavy German 88mm artillery fire and 80mm mortar fire when we landed on the eastern shore! One of those 88mm shells (or 80mm mortar bombs), hit an armored car, (probably from our own "recon" company) traveling southwards, just about 20 yards north of us, which had partly crushed the cupola (?) and also caused the armored car to burst into flames; though a couple of men seemed to have escaped, one man was trapped halfway inside and was screaming with pain because the lower half of his body must have been on fire and he couldn't get to wriggle out! Two or three infantrymen from our battalion of the 355th, who were much closer to the burning armored car than we were, approached from behind and tried to pull him out but couldn't! Almost in the very next moment he passed out…his screaming stopped…he must have died right 'then and there' with his clothing still smoldering!

The eastern shore had palisades, which reminded me of the Palisades in New Jersey, across the Hudson River from NYC. How were we to get up these slopes while enemy 80mm mortar bombs were dropping on the concrete roadbed behind us? We must have found a way or I wouldn't be here writing this! When we got to the top we became targets for a couple of German 88's which were firing at us from somewhere on top of a promontory jutting out into the river about 300 yards downstream, i.e., south of us. I don't know how the 88's were finally knocked out, or by whom, but I kept hoping that Gilberte's "Our Lady of Lourdes" medal would keep working!!