Because darkness was approaching as we neared the edge of the woods, battalion called a halt to our advance. A quick reorganization for defense of the ground we had won gave Easy Company the left side of the road, while Fox Company pulled ahead of us to defend the right side. Company G was to fall back and watch the rear against any Germans that might have been by-passed or who might approach around the flanks of the other companies.
Since I had less than a platoon, putting my men in defensive positions was no major task. Scattering them to cover as wide a sector as possible, I led a small group farther to the rear to form a roadblock. By this time, rain was pelting down again and an impenetrable darkness settled quickly in the forest. Fearful of getting off the road into the woods lest I set off a mine, I remembered a battered shelter I had noticed earlier by the side of the road. I checked into it and found it would serve as a home for the night. Shelter was hardly the word for it, but the fact that a few boards were still standing gave my messenger and me the vague impression that we had some protection from the driving rain.
I had just crawled into the shelter when a voice called my name from the darkness.
“Lieutenant Boesch.”
There was a trace of a sob as the man spoke.
“Here,” I answered.
Following my voice, the man came close enough to grab me tightly by the arm. It was Sergeant Lawrence, the platoon sergeant of the Company H machine gun platoon I had commanded back in Brittany.
“Lieutenant Boesch,” he said in a voice that was hard to control. “Osterberg just got killed.”
It was depressing news. Bob Osterberg was the “kid” of the machine gun platoon, one of the two men whose narrow escape inside the sentry box near Brest had amused the entire platoon. Like the others, I had come to love Bob Osterberg. From Chicago, he was only 19 years old but already had part of his college education behind him. He was a sincere and religious youth who earned the respect of all his buddies by sticking close to self-imposed high standards. Bob’s death was, somewhat miraculously, the first to hit the machine gun platoon since I first had taken command of it back in July. Having established this enviable record, Sergeant Lawrence would have been deeply affected by the death of any man in the platoon, but the fact that the dead man was Bob Osterberg made it all the worse.
I encouraged Lawrence to talk in the hope that this might ease some of the tension within him. He told me the platoon had moved off the road to set up its machine guns when Bob stepped on a mine. The explosion blew off a leg. Though the rest of the men tried to get to him, he refused to let them come near lest they too step on mines. Instead, Bob tried to work his way to them. Despite his wound, he managed to pull himself upright and start toward the other men, but he lost his balance and fell. This time he landed directly on a mine that blew him apart.
It was hard to think of anything to say that might soften the blow for Sergeant Lawrence.
“Bob was only one man, Lawrence,” I said finally. “And he’s dead now. You’ve got 35 others back there depending on you, even more now than before. You and I have tough jobs. We’ve got to forget the dead and lead the living, no matter how much we hate the thought.”
Whether because of my words or simply because he had poured out the story to someone else, Lawrence appeared to get better control of himself. He turned and shook my hand. Without another word he disappeared in the direction of his platoon, into the oppressive night.
As Lawrence departed, I went back to the impossible job of trying to get comfortable. In the crude shelter my messenger and I found a few small pieces of board and put them on the mud as a bed. I tried to place my massive frame on a board that was only about six inches wide. What is more, I might have made it had I not had to share it with another man.
My companion, it turned out, was a philosopher.
“Maybe we can’t sleep,” he said, “but we can’t toss and turn all night either.”
After a few minutes of silence, disturbed only by the distant thunder of artillery and the swirl of the wind and the rain, he spoke again.
“Gee, just imagine, lieutenant, somewhere in this world guys are laying in soft beds with soft-breasted girls, listening to soft music.”
Again he was meditatively silent. Then he erupted with an eloquent snort.
“I hope the dirty bastards choke!”
As we lay there shivering, one of the men at the roadblock called me. Several officers from the tank destroyer unit we had left back at the bridge had arrived and had no idea where to position their vehicles. Having seen the ground briefly by day-light, I could remember several likely positions and set out to help.
It was eerie, moving along the road with its borders of pine-concealed death. At any moment we expected the big tank destroyers to set off a mine, for engineers had not yet been able to sweep the road. Our artillery shells passed overhead in regular procession to hit the town of Huertgen, and flames from burning buildings lent a flickering glow to the sky. At long last I finished the job and made my way back to the six-inch board and asked my bedmate to move over.
As soon as it began to get light the next morning, battalion called to give me a new mission. Company G, with a pair of tanks for support, was to proceed down a firebreak off our right flank to establish contact with men of the 1st Battalion. From a map it appeared to be easy enough, for, as Captain Freeman pointed out over the phone, the firebreak “looked nice and wide.” It was an entirely different proposition on the ground. The firebreak was criss-crossed by a maze of fallen trees. The tanks obviously could not get through.
My report on the condition of the firebreak came as a revelation to the battalion staff, Contrary to the practice when Colonel Casey was around, none of the staff had been anywhere near the actual front positions. Since the tanks could not go with us, I insisted that it was ridiculous to use all of Company G on the assignment as we might run into considerable opposition and get the entire company inextricably involved. Battalion at last bought my idea that a patrol could do the job. I breathed a deep sigh of relief when finally the patrol returned, having accomplished its mission without losses.
Meanwhile, word arrived from battalion that we were to dig in where we were, and to “make the holes good and substantial with overhead cover—we’ll be here a while.” When I passed the word along, the men relished the possibility, as was quickly demonstrated by the resounding clank of shovels and picks that soon echoed through the trees. For my command post I found an excellent dugout already prepared, just 20 yards from the miserable shelter in which I had spent the previous night. In the dripping darkness of that night, however, it might as well have been 20 miles away.
As we learned from reports which gradually filtered down to us, Combat Command R of the 5th Armored Division was to take over the attack now that we had reached the edge of the woods. The armor was to sweep down another road on our battalion’s right and capture the key town of Huertgen.
Faced with the prospect of at least a short stay in one place, I decided it would be a good time to try to tie up all the loose ends of the company I had inherited. I selected one man, whose name I recall only as Dave, to go with me. Together we set out on a roundup of the rear areas to try to find other men of Company G who might have taken advantage of the confused situation to stay behind. Because Dave knew every man in the company, he would be able to help considerably.
Back past the spot where I had taken over the company, down the road through what once had been the deadly roadblock, past my old foxhole CP, and across the bridge over the creek we made our way toward battalion headquarters. It was a thoroughly depressing trip. At one place on the road, the tank destroyers on their way forward in the darkness had run over the body of a man killed the day before, adding mutilation to the already grim tragedy of death. Corpses that once had been fearful, hopeful, fighting GI’s now littered the Huertgen Forest at every turn. I had never seen so many dead men. The sight of death and the foul stench which accompanies it, even in cold weather, had, I thought, ceased to disturb me. But the presence of so many dead men wearing the shoulder patches of the 28th, 4th, and now the 8th Division, proved deeply disturbing.
In the area around battalion headquarters we started our roundup. As Dave pointed out the men he knew belonged in Company G, I would pounce on them with uncompromising suddenness. I demanded from every man an immediate explanation. Almost invariably they insisted they had been “trying to find the company.” Most of them had, in fact, reported their presence to battalion and thus were covered legally, but I cursed battalion soundly for failing to assemble the stragglers and send them back to duty.
To my surprise I also came upon the moustached second lieutenant whom I had come to loathe when he had been so reluctant to lead his men during the fighting on the Crozon Peninsula. He was, I knew, a G Company officer. He had been left behind in Luxembourg and had returned in the same vehicle which had brought Jack back to duty many days before. When I asked him why he had not come back to the company, he said he had been detailed “to protect battalion headquarters.”
“From what?” I shouted.
The next surprise came when I discovered George Company also had a rear CP complete with first sergeant and executive officer! The revelation astounded me, for I had been sent to command Company G because, after Captain Black’s evacuation, the company presumably had no other officers.
I asked the executive officer for an explanation.
“Well,” he replied lamely, “Captain Black told me to stay right here, and battalion never asked me to take over the company when Black left. So I stayed right here.”
The first sergeant, who was filling in for a hospitalized regular topkick, impressed me as being a capable man. I could not under-stand his failure to be more aggressive in getting the men up front where they belonged.
“Get all these men together, Sergeant,” I ordered. “G Company moves out from now on in one body.”
As the men began to assemble, a second lieutenant sought me out. He had just returned about an hour earlier from the hospital. I was sure I had known him some place before, but every question drew a negative response until he told me he had been wounded with Company G back at Dinard. It suddenly came to me.
“You’re the lucky bastard,” I said.
“What’s that?” the officer asked, puzzled.
“You’re the guy I called a lucky bastard because you got shot in the leg when we were going into the attack back in August.”
I was right. The officer was Lieutenant Bill Carroll, who now made the fourth officer for a company which only a short while before had ostensibly had none. Now there was the executive officer, the craven lieutenant with the moustache, Carroll and a big guy with wrestler’s ears who was trying to do the best he could as the company commander.
As we were about to leave, I decided to have the battalion surgeon, Captain Arnold S. Moe, of Bellville, Ill., take a look at my left ear. For several days, since a shell had landed fairly close with terrific concussion, the ear had been bothering me. After looking it over Dr. Moe pronounced that it would be okay within a few days even without the normal treatment with pills. However, my companion, Dave, proved to have more serious trouble. As long as we were at the aid station, he had the medics take a look at his feet, which, as he put it, had been “bothering the hell out of me recently.”
He came back somewhat shamefaced.
“I guess you’ll have to go back without me, lieutenant,” he said. “They’re sending me out. Trench foot.”
Trench foot was a disease—or perhaps more correctly an affliction—which had been taking a heavy toll of our troops and removing a lot of veterans whom enemy bullets had failed to stop. It could be attributed to the fact that the men had to stay in tight, wet shoes for long periods in cold weather without moving around. The feet would swell, thereby interfering with circulation and bruising the blood vessels.
Recommended treatment and prevention was to remove the shoes daily, massage the feet well, and change to dry socks. Though the idea was excellent, most of us found it impractical and at times impossible to comply with. In my own case, I made every effort to conform, yet I still almost came down with the affliction. It could be serious business, for it was painful, the swollen feet turned a distasteful purple, and amputation sometimes was the only recourse.
Returning to the battalion command post, I joined the men I had rounded up and started again for the front. I was returning with as many men as were presently manning the company positions.
As we passed the foxhole near the bridge in which I had spent several days, men from Graves Registration were hard at work bringing a body down the hill. They obviously had no concern with harming the remains, for they were dragging him to their trailer on his back with stout ropes tied to his wrists and ankles. The sight shocked me at first, but when I remembered what a tough haul it was up and down the hill, I could scarcely blame them. I was nevertheless glad that the body they dragged in front of me was not someone I had known. Almost hypnotized, I watched as they crammed the dirty, bloody remains of what had once been a fine young man into a clean white mattress cover they had brought along as a shroud. Once they had tied the strings, they lifted the sack and tossed it in the trailer to lie with the others.
I stared at the bodies, stacked there like so many bags of potatoes. As rugged and tough as was the infantry, I decided I would not trade jobs with the men in Graves Registration.
Returning to the positions high on the hill near the edge of the woods, I set about trying to turn Company G again into a fighting outfit. We now numbered more than 60 men and four officers. Although this still was only about one-third strength, we had to be ready momentarily for some other combat assignment. I put Carroll and Lieutenant Moustache in charge of rifle platoons, and despite my disappointment with the executive officer I kept him in that post in the event something should happen to me. I took special precautions to see that he knew everything that went on in order that he might take over on short notice.
When I found a few minutes to spare, I checked every man in the company to make sure I knew them by sight if not by name. Looking into the foxholes at the men, I tried to get the feel that Company G was really mine so that I might mould it back into the combat company it had been under Captain Black’s leadership.
It would not, I knew, be long before my efforts would be put to the test.