The next morning I awoke with a start, somehow conscious that the whole house had begun to stir nervously. Reaching instinctively for my carbine, I popped to a sitting position. One of the men who had been on guard upstairs half ran, half stumbled down the steps.
“Lieutenant,” he said excitedly, “it looks like a counterattack.”
Barefooted and helmetless I rushed up the stairs two at a time. In the distance I could hear a violent eruption of small arms fire, but it was nowhere near our positions. Breathing somewhat easier, I searched the fields ahead of us through binoculars and carefully studied the woods beyond. Still I could detect no signs that the Germans intended to strike. Grateful that it had been a false alarm, I nevertheless put additional men in good firing positions upstairs and sent non-coms to check on the other positions in the company area.
After returning to the cellar for my shoes and a K-ration break-fast, I again climbed the steps and searched the fields. I was about to leave to check on the other positions when I noticed one of the new men standing alone in a corner.
“How’re you doing, soldier?” I asked.
There was no response.
Looking at the man closely I saw that he was literally scared stiff. His eyes were staring straight ahead, seeing nothing.
In an effort to comfort the man, I put a hand on his shoulder. I might have been sticking a pin in a bag of air. With an ear-splitting scream, the man collapsed to the floor. He lay there in a miserable, jelly-like heap, trembling all over.
With the help of some of the other men, we got him downstairs into the basement where we made him as comfortable as possible until one of the medical aid men could give him a sedative. The aid man thought, as I did, that we should send the man to the rear, but Jerry was becoming so persistent with his shelling that this would have been asking for trouble.
We at last turned away in the belief that the sedative had quieted our patient. At that moment, a Jerry shell landed particularly close to the CP. In an instantaneous reaction, the soldier leaped from the floor. Standing erect, his hands thrust down stiffly at his sides, he emitted another blood-curdling scream. It was a horrible, nerve-wracking sound from another world. Then again the man slumped to the floor, trembling violently.
There was nothing we could do. We could not send him to the rear until the shelling slackened, yet to keep him there in the cellar as the shells exploded was enough to drive the rest of us at least partially insane. Every time a shell landed nearby, the man would let go with the same horrendous scream. It took little of this to put our already frayed nerves on edge.
It was in self-defense, not in callous disregard for the condition of a fellow soldier, which at last prompted the GI’s in the CP to ease their nerves by laughing and joking every time the man reacted to a shell. After a while they began to turn their quips at the man himself, but he was totally oblivious of anything that went on except the shelling. Perhaps we were callous and heart-less, perhaps our reaction was an indication of what war does to the souls of men. On the other hand, I think we did the only thing we could have done under the circumstances. however, it was still an immense relief later in the day when we were able to evacuate our screaming patient. The cellar seemed almost deathly silent after he left.
I swore I would not let the day go by without writing a letter home, yet I found it a difficult letter to write. Though I wanted to be cheerful, I knew I could not disguise the fact that something very serious had kept me from writing for the last two weeks. What to write about Jack also disturbed me. In the end I decided to say nothing about Jack, for if his wound was, in reality, minor, he himself might not be saying anything about it in his own letters home. After all, it was his wound; surely it should be his decision.
Later in the day I made another check of the company’s positions. The new men, I found, appeared to be mingling well with the old, and I knew it would be only a matter of days before you could not tell old and new apart.
Back in my basement CP things also were progressing smoothly. We had collected a number of Jerry weapons to add to our arsenal, and the men worked hard cleaning them. I felt better about G Company than at any time since I had taken command. I began to have the feeling that it really was my own company, not just a unit I was running temporarily for somebody else. I was determined to stay with these men, to try to mould them into a really capable fighting unit. I was sure that, given time, I could do it.
In mid-afternoon word arrived for me to report to battalion. The CP, to my chagrin, had been shifted back to the group of houses which had blocked our path at the beginning of the at-tack, so that I had to dodge shells and heavy traffic all the way through the town to get there. At one point I took refuge from the shelling in what was left of the church. I could not help but ponder about what God would do in retaliation for the desecration of His holy temple. As I gazed on what had been an altar, I felt moved to take off my helmet—but didn’t.
While standing in the church I noticed a jeep stop in the center of the street about 30 yards away. The driver suddenly threw the vehicle into gear and stepped on the gas. The jeep leaped forward. Seconds later a mortar shell fell and exploded exactly where the jeep had stood.
It is hard to understand how or why things like that happen. One thing is certain—the men in the jeep did not hear the mortar shell approaching, for incoming mortar shells are almost silent until they burst. I have no explanation except that it was not time for these two men to die, that some higher power somehow transmitted news of the danger to them. Subconsciously, they had reacted. If you were an infantryman, you had to believe in some kind of power like this, else you simply could not continue to exist.
As I continued toward battalion, I came upon Captain Cliett. Lieutenant Korn and his platoon, Cliett told me, still were unaccounted for. Because I had had a feeling that Korn and his men, who had been close on my right when we first set out for Huertgen, had advanced at least into the first house on the right of the road, I suggested to Cliett that we take a look there.
What we found was a pitiful sight. The house was a shambles from shellfire. Strewn all about, inside and out, were dead men. There must have been at least a dozen dead Americans, perhaps more, and a number of Germans, all intermingled. Some of the dead were partly undressed; others bore wounds which had been bandaged. Pockets of some of the men had been turned inside out, as if somebody had rifled them thoroughly. Something terribly unusual and tragic had taken place in that house, but from the grim evidence left behind we could not reconstruct the story. Yet we were able to determine that this had been Lieutenant Korn’s platoon, for Cliett recognized several of the men. The lieutenant was not among them.
Years later I was to learn that Korn and his men had, in reality, reached the house. There they had held against over-whelming odds through most of the day we had been pinned in the communications trench on the other side of the road. When ammunition finally ran out, Korn and the few men who remained surrendered. They spent the rest of the war in a PW camp.
At the battalion CP, I saw Colonel Ginder, clean shaven, fresh, getting set for the next attack. I had a chance to thank him for his timely entrance onto the Huertgen scene.
“I want to thank you too,” said the Colonel considerately. “You and your men did a magnificent job in one of the toughest fights I’ve ever seen. How do you feel?”
“I feel fine, Colonel,” I answered with a grin, “except for a big black and blue spot on my rear where your big foot kept booting me through town.” I could detect considerable resentment among some of the battalion staff against Ginder, but I personally believed that Colonel P. D. Ginder more than deserved the Distinguished Service Cross he received for his action that day. Indeed, had I had my way, he would have gotten the Medal of Honor. Before he and the tanks came into view, we were hopelessly bogged down, stopped cold. He and the tanks had infused new life and new spirit into all of us. They literally made possible the capture of Huertgen. It did not matter to me that he came from another division. He was there when we needed him and he did the job. That was what counted.
Colonel Ginder informed Cliett, Von Keller, and me that he had recommended the three of us for the Silver Star for our part in the attack. I felt a glow of pleasure with the news and was glad that I already had submitted recommendations for awards to the men who had made my own recognition possible.
I took this opportunity to confront Colonel Kunzig with a demand for a courts martial for my moustached platoon leader who had deserted us when we were pinned down in the field. In fairness to the other men who had done their jobs, some of them dying in the process, I could not do otherwise.
“Can’t do it, Boesch,” Kunzig told me.
“Can’t do it?” I asked incredulously.
“That’s right,” Kunzig said. “They evacuated him through medical channels with combat fatigue. Whether he was guilty of desertion or not, you’d never be able to prove it now. He’s in the hands of the medics.”
The reason for our call to battalion soon became apparent. The armored task force which had passed through us in Huertgen was to attack the nearby village of Brandenberg, but a neck of woods straddling the road to Brandenberg had turned out to be infested with antitank guns and mines. The tanks could not get through. We were to attack when night came in order to clear a line of departure from which we might move at dawn the next morning against the neck of woods. We were, in effect, to fight all night to secure a place from which to fight the next day. A pretty stiff order.
Because details of the attack still had not been worked out, we were to wait at the CP for the final order. Sending my messenger back to the company with a warning for Lieutenant Carroll to start preparations for the move, I went outside with Nick Von Keller for a visit to the latrine. As we returned, I met Lieutenant Roy Greene, the medical administrative officer of the battalion.
I pumped Greene for details of Jack’s wound. Though Greene had not personally seen Jack, he understood that he was not seriously hurt. There was no reason not to believe him.
Lieutenant Greene and I started together down the stairs into the basement CP. The stairs were wide enough for the two of us to walk side by side, but we had to be careful because of a slippery coat of soft, slimy mud which the passing of many feet had left on the steps.
We had gone down only a step or two when an artillery shell exploded just in front of the CP. Greene flinched; I ducked. The involuntary movements threw us together. My feet slipped out from under me. I went into the air, headed for nowhere.
The next part of my body to touch the steps was my back. I cracked my sacroiliac against the ragged edge of the stone steps, then slid, bounced, and scraped all the way down to the cellar floor.
I felt a sharp, excruciating pain in my back. My right leg lay numb. I could not move.
The men in the CP rushed to my assistance, but when they tried to help me to my feet, it felt as if a bayonet were protruding from my back. Laying me to one side, they sent a hurry-up call for Doctor Moe, the battalion surgeon.
It took Doc Moe only a few minutes to make up his mind.
I had to be evacuated.
Nothing I could say would change the decision. I begged, I pleaded. In the end, I prevailed upon him to give me a few hours in the hope the pain would desist, but as time passed, my back grew stiffen I obviously could do no good here. I had to go back.
They made preparations to turn my company over to Lieutenant Christiansen, Cliett’s executive officer. Christiansen was a good man, and I could not argue with this arrangement, but I did insist that I be allowed to stay around a few hours more in order to orient Christiansen about the company.
When Christiansen arrived, I went over the organization of the company with him carefully. As I spoke, my insides were a melange of emotions. I hated war and combat and all the misery that went with it with all my heart, yet I dreaded the thought of giving up my first company, of leaving behind under such miserable circumstances the men with whom I had come through so much, of deserting the new men who needed help so badly. Though I believed my absence would be only temporary—some strong adhesive tape and a few day’s rest should get me back on my feet—I hated leaving at all. What of the attack that night? I had gotten to know some of my men now. Christiansen would find them complete strangers, just as I had found them a few days before.
I procrastinated for several hours, stretching out my discussion with Christiansen much longer than was necessary. For one thing, I took the opportunity to ask Doc Moe about Jack. Though he assured me Jack’s wound had not been serious, I still found it difficult to be absolutely convinced. I knew then I probably never would be until I got the word from Jack himself.
Several ambulances came and went without me. Night had fallen when Doc Moe returned to issue a specific order that I was to be on the next one.
Before I left, the surgeon gave me a shot of morphine to help me get up the stairs and to ease the rough ride to the rear. Since it was impossible to carry a stretcher up the steep stairway, particularly one bearing my heavy weight, I gritted my teeth and struggled upward with the help of a man on either side. As I reached the head of the stairs, I looked back to see dirty bearded faces turned up toward me and hands raised in gestures of farewell.
In the ambulance, men with bandages sat on the seats while I and another man, his head wrapped in bloody white gauze, stretched out on litters on the floor. Despite the hurt in my back, I felt like a stupid ass. It made me boiling mad to think that I had gone through so much, including the Huertgen Forest and Huertgen itself, only to be put out of action by the kind of accident which many a housewife incurs while doing her chores at home. Not a shell fragment, not a bullet, not even combat fatigue—just a fall on my big prat.
The ambulance creaked out of the courtyard and onto the crowded road leading back from Huertgen toward the forest. Despite considerate handling by the driver, the wounded burden inside groaned at every hole in the road. Inch by inch the vehicle crept through a stygian night toward the protection of the forest, A few shells fell, not far away. I began to think of the man who wanted white sheets for Christmas. Maybe I would get a real wound after all. I wondered even if we would make it.
We were at last inside the forest and the sounds of battle a little farther away when I became nauseous, probably from a combination of the morphine, the pain in my back, the jostling, and an unaccustomed heat inside the ambulance. The driver stopped, got out, and held a helmet under my chin so I could vomit in it. I remember apologizing to the rest of the men for holding them up. They were kind enough to pass it off lightly.
A few miles to the rear we drew up at a huge tent hospital which was the division clearing station. Willing hands helped me from the ambulance into a smaller tent that served as a receiving office. I still wore my steel helmet. An orderly told me to throw it on a pile that grew alongside the entrance.
I took off the helmet and separated it from the liner. Looking at the liner, I saw my name printed across the front of it in big white letters. I had first worn that liner back in the United States at Camp Van Dorn, a million years ago, at the start of the long, seemingly vagrant road that had led to Huertgen. For a moment I would not let it go. Casting it aside would be like discarding part of me, part of all that had happened to me on that road, part of the men I had known, the men who had meant so much to me.
I stroked the liner once, like it was a live thing. Then I tossed the helmet and the liner on the pile and watched the liner tumble back to the earthen floor. There it rested, upside down, my name up-ended, along with the discarded equipment of a lot of other men.