It was about this time, in mid-October, that I lost my position as executive officer of the company. First Lieutenant Edward W. P. Ziemke, one of the original officers with Easy Company, returned from the hospital after having been wounded in the foot at Dinard. Captain McKenna rightfully returned him to his post as executive officer. I in turn asked to be shifted to a rifle platoon in order that Jack might stay with the company and keep the weapons platoon.
My assignment was to the second platoon, and I could hardly have drawn a better command. Tech Sergeant David Barber had been leading the platoon, with Staff Sergeant William F. Hobbs as second in command. They were both competent men who knew their jobs.
The platoon was on the hill the day I joined. The CP was well located, a big four-man hole among an outcropping of large rocks, almost precisely in the middle of the platoon area. Spread in an arc about 150 yards beyond the CP were the scattered outposts. Company E’s mortars plus a section of heavy machine guns from my old platoon of Company H were attached.
We were connected with six of the outposts by telephone, while the men in the others had visual contact with those equipped with telephone. Each hole accommodated three men. Every night just at dusk I made the rounds of the outposts, whereupon the men settled down for the night with the knowledge that anything else that moved in the darkness was enemy. Back at the platoon command post, we maintained an all-night vigil by the phone—Barber, Hobbs, me, and Corporal Theodore Haerich, our platoon medic.
Haerich was an excellent soldier, even though, as a medic, he was not in the strictest sense a combat man. Born in Germany, Haerich had left in 1937. He was very religious and always started his letters home with a quotation from the Bible. He was probably one of the bravest man any of us ever met. Any number of times he rescued wounded men under fire, though fully aware that shells and bullets had little or no respect for the Red Cross armband he wore. Also, by using his native tongue to advantage, he had taken numbers of prisoners. He was, in effect, a one-man propaganda bureau, talking and cajoling to convince the Germans he was one of them and that all was much better on our side of the line.
The four of us in the command post hole held many a speculative conversation through the long autumn nights.
“You think you’ll ever go back to wrestling?” Sergeant Barber asked one night.
“I’ll be satisfied just to go back,” I said. “Then again, if I do make it back, I’d like to wrestle again. You don’t do a job for ten years and then kick it aside overnight without some regret.”
“What the hell would you do if you lost a leg over here, Lieutenant?” Hobbs chipped in. “You wouldn’t be much at wrestling then.”
“Well,” I answered, “at least they’d never get a double toe hold on me.”
It was gallows humor, no doubt, but many a man engaged in it, and somehow it helped.
We worked out a system in the hole so that each man had a two-hour watch on the telephone. Each half hour he contacted every outpost to make sure all were still with us. The telephones were sound-powered, without bells, so that to attract the attention of the party at the other end we depressed the sending switch and whistled. At night we had only to breathe heavily into the mouthpiece and to the tense men at the other end of the wire it sounded as if we had set off a siren. We might not be manning the most active sector on the western front, but this did not mean that tension did not grip us, particularly at night.
One night during my turn at the phone I began to make the half-hourly check of outposts. Whistling softly into the phone, I sounded off in a quiet whisper:
“Number One.”
Number One whispered back promptly in a similar hushed but reassuring tone:
“Number One Okay.”
So it went with Number Two, Number Three, and Number Four, until at last I came to Number Five. My call to Number Five drew only silence. I tried several times, becoming increasingly concerned, then went on to Number Six and came back again to Five, With growing anxiety, I tried again and again to raise the man at Number Five phone.
“Number Five! Number Five! Outpost Number Five!”
I blew again into the mouthpiece, as loudly as I dared. Still no response. I raised my voice ever so little and whispered again.
“Number Five!”
A hoarse whisper came at last from the other end.
“All right, all right, Jeezus Cuhrist, ya don’t have to shout!”
Then still in a low, almost inaudible whisper, the voice continued. “It may be all right for you guys to shout—you’re way back there!”
I sat stunned for a moment. Way back there! We were way back there!
It was funny at the time, but actually it was an accurate indication of the state of everybody’s nerves in those tense days. We were scarcely 150 yards from Outpost Number Five, and if an attack had begun, we might have been even more involved in it than the man in Number Five; but in his mind we were behind him, so we were “way back there.” Somebody was almost always a little farther back for the GI to complain about. I suppose the troops at corps headquarters 50 miles behind the line looked on those at army headquarters another 25 miles or so behind as “rear echelon.”
While we were on the hill, we received a new item of equipment, a sleeping bag. It was a kind of shroud, a wool interlining in a water-repellent poplin cover, full length to include the head with just enough opening for the face to protrude. Both the wool lining and the poplin outer sheet had long zipper fastenings.
The first night we had the sleeping bags, I looked forward to a warm night’s rest. Confidently, I removed my shoes, a luxury we seldom permitted ourselves this far forward. Outside the air was cold, but inside I felt delightfully snug. Pulling the zippers (located inside the bags) with a delicious sense of warmth, I settled back on the ground to revel in this marvelous acquisition the supply people had so cleverly dreamed up for us at the front.
Panic suddenly seized me. What if the Jerries should come? How the hell would I get out? The sleeping bag became a strait jacket. Looking at the entrance to the hole, I could have sworn I saw a big German standing there, grinning malevolently at my efforts to free myself. Grabbing almost frantically at the zippers, I fought to get out. At last I was free. I sat bolt upright.
I refused to get out of the bag; it was too warm and comfortable for that. But I knew I had to do something to lick my overworked imagination, or I soon would have to part with the new-found warmth.
First I tried bringing my carbine inside the bag with me, but this was of little help. Next I tried placing it close alongside me, outside the bag, but this too gave me little peace of mind. I tried several more positions, all to no avail, until finally I hit upon the solution of hanging my carbine from the log roof of the hole, its muzzle pointed toward the entrance. If the Germans came, I might reach up, even without freeing myself entirely, and press the trigger. Somehow this helped, whether because I really believed I might fight off the enemy in this manner or simply because I had worn myself out in the process, I do not know. In any event, I pulled the zippers closed and drifted off to sleep, both zippers gripped tightly in my hands.
It was about this time too that we began to experience a cigarette shortage. This was all the more ironic since we had been so free with cigarettes ever since our arrival in France. On the train trip from Brest the men had traded with cigarettes as if the supply were inexhaustible. We had always had enough, issued without charge, just like rations. This sudden drying up of sup plies caught just about everybody without reserve stocks, so that I, a non-smoker, discovered I was one of the more popular members of the company. All I had to do was open a K-ration and any number of nicotine addicts were clambering around me in quest of the four little cigarettes the K-ration package contained.
The reason for the shortage of tobacco soon became apparent. Stories in Stars & Stripes revealed that a railway company of the Transportation Corps, whose job it was to operate the freight trains which brought supplies forward, had been involved in a scandalous black market operation that was netting the men involved millions of francs. The details of the court martial, which told how the men would run carloads of cigarettes, chocolate, or gasoline onto a siding and then sell the entire car, contents and all, to the black market, made our blood boil and our tempers run hot.
“They ought to hang the bastards,” was the usual comment.
“Yeah,” another man would add, “and I’d like to be pulling the rope when they do it.”
I never saw such genuine anger vented—even against our enemy—as I saw turned against this small band of selfish men who stole the comforts, even necessities, from their comrades who were doing the fighting. To an infantryman, the business of not letting your comrades down is sacred and vital; sometimes it is all that keeps a man going when things are rough. Few of us could understand how other Americans could treat us in such a shabby manner.
We watched the trial with keen personal interest, frequently suggesting to each other the type and length of punishment these culprits should receive. Some of our suggestions, I fear, would have set justice back to the Inquisition, and might even have suggested to those ancient purveyors of torture a new wrinkle or so. But we were never to receive the satisfaction of pulling the rope ourselves or even of hearing that somebody else pulled the rope. For when the court martial passed sentence, our Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, gave the morale of all of us at the front a kick in the teeth. He offered to erase the sentence if the thieves would volunteer to be trained as infantry and go into the line to fight alongside the men they had betrayed.
We scarcely could believe what we read!
“Since when is fighting for your country a punishment?” Sergeant Hobbs demanded in a real fury. “I’ve been in the infantry four long hard years, not to escape jail either.”
“Who the hell wants to join the infantry,” another man asked, “when they make it the dumping ground for all the dirty bastards in the world? Eisenhower should have kept his damned nose out of this and let those guys rot in jail where they belong.”
I could not help but agree. These men were solid American citizens, intent on doing their assigned part in a terrible war, and in the process they had come to respect the branch of service which they learned through hard experience does the bloody job of meeting the enemy face to face. In one ill-advised move, General Eisenhower had done more to damage the morale of every rifleman in Europe than the Jerries with all their high-priced propaganda could have accomplished in a lifetime.
“Just let me find one of those sonsabitches in my squad,” one of my squad leaders remarked, shifting a chew of tobacco violently from one cheek to the other. “He’ll wake up KIA with a bullet in the back.”
To compensate in small measure for the lack of cigarettes, we received an occasional ration of what was classified as “PX supplies.” These rations came forward at irregular intervals. Actually, the news of their coming arrived first. We were never told what we would get, just how much our allotted share would cost. Whereupon we did a little quick arithmetic and collected prorata amounts from each squad. Once we had sent the money back to headquarters, we started anticipating what we might be buying. Unfortunately, most of our guesses were wishfully far from the mark.
When the shipment finally reached the platoon, we had all the squad leaders present so they could see we divided the items equally. I usually took what was left. Generally we got candy bars, sometimes cans of fruit juice (perhaps one can to a squad of 12 men), a few cigars, an occasional plug of chewing tobacco, a few packs of cigarettes, sometimes ink and writing paper. Once the items were divided among 35 or 40 men, no individual got very much, but we were grateful even for little things.
What irritated us about the whole process was that we knew when the PX shipment first started out it had contained many choice items like fountain pens, cigarette lighters, lighter fluid, watches, combs, razors, things that the men genuinely needed. But as each succeeding echelon got its hands on the shipment, it dwindled in size and selection. One day we found we had paid for a hundred bars of toilet soap, yet we had nowhere to take a bath. We heard of one man as far down the ladder as a rifle squad who actually got a watch once, but the story had it that he was in another regiment, and nobody ever actually verified it.
The newspaper, Stars & Stripes ran into the same diminishing process. It left the presses in great numbers, and in rear echelon units close to the point of origin almost every man had his individual copy. But by the time the paper travelled forward, we in the rifle platoons were lucky to get one copy per squad. Even then the paper was a day or so late, but we thumbed the precious print until it wore thin from fond handling.
While in Luxembourg, the officers and some of the senior sergeants received a liquor ration—for a fee, of course. It was another blind purchase. We were told to send back a certain sum for liquor, and we dutifully complied. When the bottles reached us, we divided them in whatever size, amount, and variety the supply allowed. Since I didn’t drink, I could have sold my ration at an astronomical profit, but there was much more satisfaction in dividing it free among the men of the platoon. With so many men and so little liquor, no danger existed that anybody would get too much.
Once, when an epidemic of chest colds was plaguing the platoon and the loud coughing at night had become a real danger, I decided to use my liquor ration for medicinal purposes. Tired, muddy, bearded men arrived at the command post, half a squad at a time, for their one hot meal of the day. Their faces lit up when they spied Corporal Haerich standing near the food with a bottle of cough medicine in one hand, a bottle of Vat 69 in the other. A man had his choice of treatment—Vat 69 or cough medicine. We had plenty of cough medicine left.
The nervous strain of being on line continued to be alleviated every six days by a few days in reserve, either in Bettendorf or another village, Gilsdorf. The men looked forward to the break, to hot baths, a few glasses of watered beer.
Chow time during these breaks was always the signal for a horde of visitors, most of them kids. Though we detected no real lack of food among the civilians in Luxembourg, the fare must have been dreadfully monotonous. When we had anything left over, we usually passed it along to the civilians, who appeared exceedingly grateful.
We usually let the kids have the variety of things that came with the 10-in-l rations, the candy bars, hard water soap, other little items. We put them in a big after-dinner “grab bag.” One night after the kids had emptied the bag, we had a visit at our CP from a perturbed village priest.
“Please,” the priest said apologetically, “would you please to take away from the children the balloons? Yes? Please?”
“Balloons?” said Sergeant Foy. “We ain’t had no balloons,”
He thought for a moment.
“Holy mackerel!” he shouted.
In a flash we all knew what had happened. Somebody by mistake had put a box of rubber prophylactics in the after-dinner grab bag, and the kids had understandingly mistaken them for balloons. When the elders saw the kids playing with them, they had blushed to their finger tips and detailed the village priest to set the matter right.
While in reserve on one occasion, Jack and I shared a room, along with Lieutenant Theodore Evergreen, of Pasadena, Cali-forma. Ted was assigned to Company E but was on duty with battalion as a liaison officer to regimental headquarters. As a liaison officer he had his own jeep and thus had been able to assemble and carry along with him a variety of souvenirs, including a captured Jerry radio. The radio made a most welcome addition to our room. Sweet music coming over the Armed Forces Radio Network brought a flood of poignant memories and produced a wave of homesickness that all but overwhelmed us. I heard the song I had learned to love at Brest, “Good Night, Wherever You Are,” and had a chance to hear one that Eleonore had written about, “I Walk Alone.” We sprawled on our bedrolls on the floor and wrote long, and probably sad, letters home.
One day Captain McKenna returned from a visit to battalion headquarters and brought with him an enticing proposal.
“Boesch,” he said in his pleasant manner, “we can send one officer to Paris along with the enlisted men of the regiment to take care of the convoy. You want to go?”
I thought for a moment. It was a wonderful opportunity, one that might not occur again.
“Captain,” I suggested, “Lieutenant Bochner has been in combat as long as I have. I think he’d enjoy the chance. Does it matter to you which one goes?”
“Well, not exactly, except that Bochner is really an F Company officer. But if you want to turn your chance over to him, it’s up to you.”
I went to Jack with the proposition. As much as I wanted to see Paris, I knew Jack would enjoy it more. He liked an occasional drink, he spoke French fluently, and he had not travelled as extensively as I. His eyes lit up when I made the suggestion.
The next morning we searched the possessions of every man in the company in order to come up with a clean uniform for Jack’s trip. When he left he was dressed in a composite, but sartorially correct uniform.
While Jack was away, Ted Evergreen had to make a trip to the city of Luxembourg, about 25 miles away, on regimental business and asked if I’d like to go along. I was delighted with the opportunity and subsequently found the old city a fascinating place.
As we drove down the narrow streets I marvelled at the old-world architecture, but even more entrancing was the sight of normal things like trolley cars, moving picture theaters, crowds of civilians, and stores with their wares displayed in the windows. As we rode down one street, I saw a bakery with a window full of pastries that looked more than simply appetizing. I prevailed on Ted to stop while I went inside to make a few purchases. The pies and cakes turned out to be not quite so tasty as they looked, for they were made of substitute materials for the most part, but back at the platoon this would hardly be noticed.
Shortly after my visit to Luxembourg we moved out of reserve and back on the hill where I was destined for one of my more narrow escapes of the war.
It was an unwritten rule that any time you installed a new booby-trap, mine, or other lethal device, you passed along this information to those who followed you in the position. But the troops we followed apparently ignored the rule, for after they left we discovered any number of devices they had installed with never a word of warning to us.
One day as I was returning from an early morning patrol, I decided to use a path I had not taken before. As we approached our position, I called ahead to the man on guard to ask if the trail had been checked for explosives.
“Sure has, Lootenant,” he called back confidently. “Come on in.”
I walked ahead, well in advance of my patrol. I suddenly felt my foot catch against something, then heard a loud POP! I recognized the sound immediately as that of the safety lever disengaging from a hand grenade. Almost without thinking I realized I had exactly four seconds to put some distance between me and the grenade. I ran, counting instinctively. Taking three giant steps, I hit the ground heavily. Just as I fell, the grenade exploded. The air around me filled with dirt, metal fragments, smoke, and pieces of brush.
I lay for a moment where I had fallen, tightly clutching my helmet and trying to regain my breath. Rising rather gingerly to my feet, I felt around my body for the wounds I was sure I had, but to my amazement, I was unharmed. I shook pieces of branches from my uniform and tiny, hot pieces of the grenade that had hit the trees and then fallen down on me, but I didn’t have a scratch.
When Jack returned from Paris, he brought things he had bought for the two of us to send home as Christmas gifts. I need not have made my elaborate plans with my sister Margie after all.
But Jack’s return also brought some unpleasant developments. He was to return to duty with Company F. Several new officers arrived in Easy Company to bring us up to strength, Lieutenant Martin Weinberger, of Bayonne, N.J., and Lieutenant James J. Gillespie, of Philadelphia.
Battalion also made a surprise change, removing Lieutenant Ziemke as executive officer and replacing him with First Lieutenant Nikolai Von Keller, a Russian-born American from New York City. Von Keller was a big, affable Russian, a particular favorite of Colonel Casey’s. Since he was the oldest lieutenant in the battalion, Colonel Casey had decided, probably correctly, that he deserved an executive officer post.
Von Keller had a thick accent and a good sense of humor.
“I just got so the guards in Fox Company will not shoot me,” he said in his garbled way, “and now maybe I will be shot in Easy Company. They think always I am a German. Always I am saying the password upside down and backwards and too late.”
Lieutenant Ziemke came to the second platoon, since it had been his before he was wounded. I moved to the weapons platoon to take Jack’s place.
The days passed slowly, and the nights changed from chilly to genuinely cold. One night a blanket of snow descended on the hills. The Luxembourg natives assured us it was the earliest snowfall in many years and made dire predictions for a fierce, long winter ahead. It was far from reassuring.
During that first snow-capped morning, I had a telephone call from battalion. The man at the phone whispered to me as if the Lord himself was on the line.
“It’s Colonel Casey,” he breathed.
I picked up the phone with some trepidation, wondering just what I had done to warrant a chewing out from the battalion commander himself.
“Boesch,” the Colonel said, short, to the point. “I’ve got space open for an officer to go to Paris. Do you want to go or don’t you? I’m asking you to go, not just any officer from E Company, and I don’t want it passed on to somebody else. Is it yes or no?”
“It’s yes,” I blurted out, “that is—yes, sir!”
He hung up, and I turned around with a wide grin on my face.
“That was short and sweet, lieutenant,” said Sergeant Abbot. “You look as pleased as a man who just got told he was going to Paris.”
“That’s just what I was told, Sergeant,” I replied. “Just what I was told. And I said yes!”