UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

continuing on to the wadi? A certain derring-do that sometimes characterized our closest allies elicited a certain ancestral resentment in Delmar Griffith, who took the Welsh view, just as Dowdall took the Irish.

Regiment was just hungry for information, and three or four of us got out there in no-man’s-land and ended up where the British, the crazy devils, had put their guns on a mound instead of defilade, with a trench, and abandoned it. We were about to set up an OP on a little elevation when the Germans sent in the worst barrage I was ever in. We were down in the trench with shells and the dirt flying in and the smoke so thick you couldn’t breathe. I was scared. I thought, “Well, this is it, I won’t get outta this one.” They were zeroed in, but none of us got hit. I had thoughts I never had before. I just sorta condemned the whole of mankind. I wasn’t prayin’, I was cussin’.

I went one stretch of fifty or sixty hours without a wink of sleep. Finally had a chance and came back to the CP where I had a shallow hole. It was after dark when I threw my blanket in and crawled in, and when I finally woke up along toward noon they’d shelled the area. There was a new shell hole right next to me, and I didn’t even hear it.

What little we knew or guessed of what was unfolding up the highway, I had scant heart and energy, and no inclination, to record when it was over, except, twelve days later: “Second Battalion was pushed too far ahead, got trapped and surrounded, part of them living in a cave. Before they got out Jerry smashed them. They had 200 men left. Three of our new men, Mountain, Sumey, and Fleischer, went out on a detail to them and haven’t been heard of since. Captured, I hope.”

The second day of the counterattack, February 17, a battalion of the Sixth Armored Infantry moved into the gap between our depleted Second and Third Battalions. Captain Felix Sparks withdrew the fourteen left from his E Company and four others from H Company down the highway to a rise of ground two hundred yards to the left, where they dug in. Again the Germans attacked with tanks and infantry, this time against the machine guns of G Company set up so lethally on a bluff above the Caves that soon an X of bodies marked the paths of their crossfire, and the survivors withdrew.

Nevertheless, a wedge two miles wide and a mile deep had been driven between the 157th and 179th into which General Mackensen threw forty FW-190s and Me-109 fighter planes. The Sixth Corps responded with seemingly overwhelming artillery and anti-aircraft, plus big naval gunfire from two cruisers offshore, and 1,100 tons of bombs.

Ordered to stop the 14th Army at the concertina wire, I Company at dusk was barraged and then attacked by German infantry. The guys cut them down at the wire, only to face the direct fire of a trio of tanks. The remaining Krauts crept around and harassed them all night, but they held the line.

At daybreak on the eighteenth, K and L Companies and the already battered 179th tried to push the line back up to our now-surrounded Second Battalion, whose supply routes were virtually cut off, but they ran into fresh Germans preparing to attack and were pushed back.