By the time I got back to the rear command post, events had begun to happen with astounding speed. Company G already had left to go around the opposite side of the creek and repeat the heroic climb which the single platoon had accomplished the day before.
Colonel Casey, it developed, had pulled back this platoon during the night lest it be captured or annihilated, a move not fully appreciated at higher headquarters. As it was explained to us at company level, withdrawing this platoon was what cost both Colonel Casey and Colonel Jeter their commands. The 121st Infantry was the poorer for this decision, for both were excellent officers. General Stroh, who stood by Casey and Jeter, received the fate reserved for those of the rank of General and went home on sick leave, but he never returned to the division that loved him so well.
The news took time to filter down to us, and I first learned of it in an embarrassing manner. I had reason to call battalion. When a strange voice answered, I asked who it was.
“This is Kunzig,” the voice said.
“Who the hell is Kunzig?” I shot back bluntly.
“This is Lieutenant Colonel Kunzig, your new battalion commander.”
It was several days before I actually got to see Lieutenant Colonel Henry B. Kunzig, and during that time he remained but a voice on the telephone.
The new regimental commander for the 121st Infantry turned out to be Colonel Thomas J. Cross, who had been chief of staff of the division. Colonel Cross was a considerate, thoughtful man who had the best interests of his men and his outfit at heart. He was soon to gain the respect of the regiment despite the fact that he faced a handicap in following in Colonel Jeter’s steady footsteps.
Command of the 8th Division passed to Brigadier General William G. Weaver, known as “Wild Bill” because of earlier exploits with the 90th Division. Like Colonel Cross, General Weaver was one who looked after those under his command. He was to do an excellent job and to be promoted to Major General before having to relinquish the command some months later because of a heart attack.
When Company G finally got to the top of the steep slope without any real trouble, the lone officer with the company, Lieutenant Rollie Moore, sent a messenger to my CP with the news so that I in turn could notify battalion. Having delivered the news, the messenger headed back. I saw him walk across the road and start to descend to the creek through a stretch of battered trees along a route which no one, to my knowledge, had used before.
I called out to him.
“Hey, soldier, where the hell are you going?”
“Back to G Company,” the man answered.
“Hadn’t you better stick to the road and take the same path your company used?” I asked. “You never know what you’ll find down in those woods.”
“That way’s too damned long, lieutenant,” the man replied. “I’m pooped. Don’t worry about me. I know what I’m doing.”
Before I could say anything else he disappeared beyond the road and over a deep drop. Something inside me said to call the man back and order him to take the regular route, but for some inexplicable reason the words stuck in my throat and I said nothing.
It was only a matter of minutes before a loud explosion rent the woods. Then a terrifying scream. Then two more explosions. More screams.
I knew instinctively what had happened. The man had set off one mine and then others as, in agony, he thrashed about.
Several of us ran to the spot where I had seen the messenger disappear into the woods. Though the screams continued, we could see no sign of the soldier through the gloomy forest. Hastily, I looked about for a patch of fairly clear ground that might lead me in the direction of the cries. As I started to descend the slope, an engineer lieutenant joined me. Together we started down the side of the hill, trench knives drawn, probing the ground in front of us. It was an almost impossible task. Leaves and fallen branches and bits of trees had laid a heavy carpet which completely hid any mines.
“Look, lieutenant,” the engineer officer said to me finally, “we’ll never get there this way. It’ll take hours. Look, I’ll take some litter bearers down to the bridge and we’ll follow the stream. They wouldn’t have mined the stream.”
It seemed the only chance to reach the man. I stayed where I was in order that the engineer officer might know when he reached a point in the stream opposite where the man had disappeared.
The screams already were growing fainter as the lieutenant and four litter bearers slipped over the side of the bridge into the icy water. Slowly and carefully, testing occasionally for mines, each man followed closely behind the other as they made their way down the creek. All went well until one of the medics grew careless and stepped out of the narrow stream of water. A mine erupted with a roar. With a vicious thoroughness, it snapped off the man’s leg.
Sorrowfully, the lieutenant and the other three men put the medic on the stretcher and retraced their steps. By the time the wounded man had been removed to the aid station and another recruited to take his place, it was getting dark and the cries of the wounded messenger had ceased. Without his cries to guide on, it would be impossible to find him, and any number of other men might lose limbs in the process. We had no choice but to leave the man to die a lonely, forsaken, painful death.
It did not pay to get off the beaten paths in the Huertgen Forest. Up on the hill Company F’s supply sergeant was delivering rations when he strayed from the usual path, stepped on a mine, and died instantly. As Easy Company renewed the attack and again ran into the murderous fire at the concertina wire obstacle, one of the men in Lieutenant Weinberger’s platoon spotted a mine and yelled to the lieutenant to watch out for it. Weinberger took a step backward and with that one step set off still another mine. The explosion severed his leg just above the ankle. They carried him down the hill on a stretcher with the bloody stump protruding from under the blanket—solemn, grim evidence of the dangers which lurked in the forest.
Reports like these came in constantly from every part of the front.
With Company E’s second failure to break through the concertina wire and with Company G’s success in its flanking maneuver, the attack plan was changed. Company E came down the hill with orders to force a way straight up the road past the roadblock which earlier had halted Captain Black and the main body of Company G. The two companies then were to join forces for a new attack.
It was late afternoon when Easy Company came down from the hill and the next morning before the company was ready to attack. Once begun, the advance was deliberate. The roadblock was destroyed and several light tanks moved forward to reinforce the riflemen. I prepared to go forward too to help Nick now that he and Kee were the only officers left, but just as I started up the road, one of the men called me back to the telephone. It was Colonel Kunzig.
“Boesch,” Kunzig said, “can you take over G Company? They just evacuated Captain Black. He won’t be back for some time and they don’t have an officer left.”
Colonel Kunzig seemed to be asking me whether I could do the job rather than ordering me to do it. The thought flashed through my mind that he knew nothing first-hand about me, so he really was questioning my confidence in my own ability.
I replied quickly and with conviction.
“Immediately, if you want it, sir,”
Picking up my raincoat and musette bag, I started up the road. On the way I passed along the line of men of Company E stretched on the sides of the road. They were in good spirits and ribbed me about my unkempt appearance. Since laughs were few and far between those days, I encouraged this kind of joking. My own favorite, though admittedly feeble, attempt at humor generally consisted in going up to some stoop-shouldered, shuffling GI and asking him sternly, “Soldier, did you shave this morning?” Invariably the man would stare at me as if he thought I was crazy until eventually he would realize that my beard was twice as long and twice as black as his. Then he would manage a wry smile.
Continuing past the men of Company E, I reached the light tanks when a barrage of mortar shells began to fall. I dived under the nearest tank, grateful for the tons of steel over me. It was an accurate concentration, zeroed with what seemed incredible accuracy on the twisting forest road. Several men of E Company were hit in the shelling; one man not ten feet from the tank where I hid was killed.
Without further incident, I reached my destination, but the sight that awaited me there was not one to inspire satisfaction or confidence. George Company’s casualties had been extremely high and the company’s last officer—Rollie Moore, whom I had known well back at Camp Van Dorn—had been killed that morning. Rollie’s body lay in a ditch beside the road. As I looked down, paying him a silent tribute, one of his men spoke.
“He wouldn’t have been killed,” the man said, “if he had stayed in his hole, but he was always worrying about the rest of us and going around in the open to check on how we were.”
No officer, it seemed to me, ever received a more effective tribute to his ability and devotion.
Gathering my squad leaders around me, I took a physical count of the men we had on hand for duty—less than 30. Instead of about 190 men in the company with the usual 160 of them available for fighting, I had less than enough to make up a full platoon. It was not an encouraging prospect for the difficult jobs ahead.
One of the platoon sergeants was not so pessimistic.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “I think some of them sonsobitches are still in the rear. They can’t all be dead. When Captain Black went back it knocked hell outa this company, and a lot of yellow belly bastards took advantage of it.”
I resolved to look into his charges at the first opportunity, but for now there was no time—we had a job to do. I checked to see what weapons were in operating order and appointed several men as temporary non-commissioned officers. Next I directed that all the weapons from casualties be piled together for collecting and servicing by the supply sergeant. I checked every man for ammunition and made sure he was ready to fight. Although Easy Company now had passed through us to take the lead in the new attack, we might be called upon at any time.
Looking around at the position Company G held, I could see at a glance how impossible was the route up the steep slope which the company had followed to get there. The men obviously could not have made it except that Jerry himself had considered the route impassable and therefore had neglected to defend it adequately. I admired these men—and Rollie Moore— tremendously for having accomplished it.
As the tanks passed through to join Company E, I hurried my reorganization. Though Company E was to lead the new attack, Nick Von Keller and his men were only a hundred yards be-yond us, and I was to follow them closely. Thus, time for preparations was short.
When Lieutenant Bob Murphy of Company H joined me by the roadside, we examined his map carefully to see what fires his 81mm mortars could provide. Together we went forward to meet Nick and make final plans for the attack. We found the big Russian in a quandary. He had orders to move out immediately, but he wanted to wait until mortar fire could be brought to bear on the woods directly ahead. Murphy said it would take almost an hour before the mortars could get into position to fire.
To me it seemed ridiculous to wait, thus giving the Germans that much more time to get ready. As evidenced by the condition of the forest all around us, this part of the woods had already been hit by everything from hand grenades to 500-pound bombs.
“If all that shelling hasn’t driven them out,” I argued, “a few more mortar shells aren’t going to do it.”
Nick was unmoved. Only a few minutes before, he had experienced real and terrible verification that the Germans still were around when one of his best non-coms, Tech Sergeant Eugene L. Craig, Jr., had moved around the next bend in the road only to be cut down by machine gun fire.
I still could not agree with Nick.
“Look, Nick,” I said. “Let’s use the tanks as a base of fire. Let them fire their cannons and machine guns for all they’re worth, and we’ll move right along with them. The edge of the woods isn’t so far away. Maybe with a little noise and surprise we can burst right through.”
When I left Nick to make his decision he was rubbing a stubbled chin in a dirty hand, thinking over the advice I had given.
Back at my CP—which was just a couple of green boughs slanted against the side of the hill in lean-to fashion—Murphy and I had resumed our close examination of the map when mortar shells again began to bounce with unerring accuracy on the road. Bob and I scrambled into the water-filled ditch until the bombardment was over. As we began to pick ourselves up, I noticed that the water in the ditch was red with blood. I thought at first the blood must have come from someone wounded or killed by the shelling, but as I looked farther up the ditch I realized with horror that the blood came from my old friend, Rollie Moore. What a horrible thing, this war. Here I was virtually bathing in the blood of an old friend. The goose flesh stood up in great patches down the middle of my back.
We had one man wounded in the shelling, and I made immediate arrangements to have him taken to the aid station. Like most tragedies though, this particular shelling had its lighter moments. When I had first arrived at Company G’s position one of my first tasks was to clear the road of debris so the tanks could get through without difficulty. I was, somehow, proud of my nice clean road. Now when the shelling stopped, I raised my head to find that my road was blocked by a medium-size tree.
“Now where in the hell did that tree come from?” I demanded.
Bob Murphy thought it was the funniest remark of the war. Almost every time he saw me after that, he chirped in comic mimicry:
“Now where in the hell did that tree come from?”
Soon after the shelling, I looked up to see Jack approaching down the road. With him was Captain John R. Cliett, of Bainbridge, Ga., one of the original officers with the One-Two-One who had returned from the hospital while we were in Luxembourg to take command of Company F. Leaping from my foxhole, I greeted Jack enthusiastically in the middle of the road. The men around us must have thought we were crazy, carrying on that way in this God-forsaken spot.
Jack and I never had held morbid conversations about what each was to do should the other be killed. On the other hand, we knew instinctively that we could trust each other, should such a tragic occasion arise, to care for Norma or for Eleonore, whichever it might be. It was something we did not have to talk about.
The fact is, I never had the feeling that I would not come home from Europe. For me, my journey was a round-trip affair. A man did not dare let his thoughts wander too far from the gloomy present into the even more dismal realm of what might happen. Somewhere there had to be a ray of hope to enable you to carry on from one bloody, muddy, miserable day to the next. Most of those who cracked under the strain were those whose imaginations grew too fertile when the shells began falling and the bullets cracked closer and closer. All of us held the fervent hope that ours, if and when it came, would be the million dollar wound. Some of us had to be wrong, of course, but who would concede that it might be you?
I always thought that the purely apocryphal tale we heard during our training days at Gamp Van Dorn perfectly illustrated the attitude of the average soldier toward death. The story had to do with a battalion commander who stood in front of his men before an attack and painted a picture of impending doom.
“By tomorrow morning,” the commander presumably had remarked, “every man here, except one, will be dead.”
The remark bit deeply into every man present, and each glanced at his comrades with undisguised compassion,
“Gee,” each man thought to himself, “those poor fellows.”
When Jack and I had exchanged a few remarks, we began to talk with Captain Cliett about resuming the attack. Jack and Cliett both agreed with Murphy and me that the best thing to do was to move ahead with the tanks immediately.
Realizing that the consensus was against him, Nick decided to move. As the tanks opened up with their machine guns and cannon, the stalled column shook off its inertia. The incessant chattering of the machine guns spitting their messages of death coupled with the staccato bark of the cannon gave the men confidence and support. They surged steadily ahead. So many bullets filled the air that ricochets became a menace.
But if we were alarmed, then Jerry was thoroughly upset. The sudden thrust obviously took him by surprise. We flushed Germans out of foxholes which under normal circumstances might have served them well for days or even weeks. The big tank guns got in their work with deadly aim. As the road straightened out in the direction of the edge of the woods overlooking the village of Huertgen, pillboxes on either side fell rapidly.
We might yet get out of this forest in hell.