UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

Just before we were about to leave there was a burst of burp-gun fire and a few rifle shots to our left front. The artillery forward observer, surmising a counterattack, radioed in the concentration and had a couple of dozen rounds thrown in. A few minutes later two men brought in a sergeant wounded by burp-gun in arm and leg who said that his outpost had been sitting around talking when they saw two or three men appear about twenty-five yards in front of them. He challenged three times, and the third time one of them opened up with his Schmeisser, whereupon he shot him through the chest. Then came the artillery.

We decided to go out and try to bring in a man from the patrol, wounded or not. Of course we didn’t know how big the patrol was, how many were still alive, whether they were being reinforced, or what. We sneaked out, found the remaining man on the outpost scared as hell, went a little farther and found two dead Germans. We searched them, and Smitty was commencing to cut the pockets of a third who was apparently dead, when he sat bolt upright, his hands in the air. So there was I&R’s first prisoner.

That box barrage the FO called for in fact landed behind us as “friendly fire” between wherever we were in no-man’s-land and our lines. An unpleasant sensation to be out there in front of your own shellfire. Dowdall was sweating it.

I went out ahead about twenty yards farther, layin’ as close to the ground as I could, prayin’ “Hurry up Mickey! Hurry up!” because at the end o’ this field was a row o’ bushes, an’ I was thinkin’ mebbe the Jerries are comin’ up from there. Then, “He’s alive! Thank God, thank God! Get him on his feet, let’s go, get him on his feet!” I’ve never been so scared. Me mind was racin’, but me body was actin’ calmly.

On our way back I paused over the paratrooper who’d burp-gunned the sarge who shot him dead through the chest. He’d fallen forward on his Schmeisser. I rolled him over and almost without thinking grabbed his gun and caught up with the others. No use leaving it there for one of his Kameraden to recycle against us, and besides, what a trophy! It felt wet. I peered at my hands in the dark. They were soaked with his blood.

Back at our CP I scrubbed myself and cleaned and scrubbed my spoil of war, and showed it off to the guys. Jack thought he might arrange for me to send it home somehow (fat chance), so I recorded the serial number, 2092f, and stashed it away in our supply tent.¹³

Our prisoner, one tough Kraut, was passed back to Division for interrogation. Trubia heard they put him in a locked room with a big MP who was going to use his fists to get him to talk—and our paratrooper beat the MP up. So they bucked him back to Corps, Waldron heard, where “they tried to break him down by making him dig his own grave, and I’ll be a son-of-a-gun if he didn’t escape with knowledge of the location of all of our positions!”

“Oh, I felt so mad about that,” steamed Dowdall, “because I remembered the fear I had, bein’ out there, to go through all that trouble an’ all that fear, an’ those bastards [strong language for Jimmy] back there lettin’ him git away!”

Anyway, he was our first prisoner without our firing a shot, so our hands (except mine) were clean, nor was it ours he slipped through.