The trucks, creaking and rumbling, took us back to the vicinity of the farm from which we had jumped into the battle for Brest. Wearily we unloaded to try to find a comfortable spot in the cold, damp fields. In the morning we moved, again by truck, to another assembly area even farther to the rear, but instead of enjoying the ride, we were justifiably suspicious. We could detect a tough assignment ahead.
When we reached the assembly area and gathered around the briefing officer, our suspicions grew stronger. Hot showers, the officer told us, were ready, and we would have steak for dinner that night. It would be the first fresh meat I had eaten since landing in France.
“Steak?” Jerry Schwartz muttered to Johnny Pavlick. “What the hell is steak?”
“Steak,” said Johnny solemnly, “is what they give prisoners in the death row for their last sumptuous meal.”
“I see what you mean,” returned Jerry dryly. “I see just what you mean.”
We didn’t have long to wait to find out exactly what it really did mean. The 8th Division’s next mission, our briefing officer told us, was to clear the Crozon Peninsula.
The Crozon Peninsula is a small finger of land south of Brest. It was the big guns of Crozon which dominated the entrance to the Brest harbor. No matter who held Brest itself, the harbor would be useless unless he also commanded the harbor entrance, and that meant holding the Crozon Peninsula. Also, since many of the big artillery pieces that had been making the attack on Brest so difficult were located on the peninsula, clearing it would contribute directly to capture of the city.
Reducing the peninsula was to be primarily an 8th Division assignment but with help from a task force of tank destroyers, armor, field artillery and members of the French Forces of the Interior, the FFI. The latter were men of the French underground resistance movement who had been armed by the Allies before the invasion and who had made life miserable for Jerry all over Brittany. They had no uniforms but wore identifying arm bands with the letters FFI scrawled on them. Most of the men were poorly trained, but what they lacked in military instruction, they made up for in hatred for the Germans and enthusiasm for the battle to liberate their homeland.
Before being committed to this engagement, however, our men were to be paid. Designated as company finance officer, I was to make a trip back to Division Rear headquarters to pick up the money and the payroll.
In combat a division headquarters is divided into two sections. A forward echelon, which follows comparatively close to the fighting, is the tactical nerve center; the other portion farther to the rear is the housekeeping establishment, a place where men do paper work and keep the vast records required by the 15,000 men assigned to the division. To the fighting man, both sections appear far from danger, but even the men in the forward echelon of the headquarters look on those at Division Rear as a bunch of school boys with safe, easy jobs.
With a jeep and driver, I set out. The day was delightful and the countryside beautiful. I relaxed completely, the noise and stress of battle almost forgotten. The woods and fields, little damaged by the war, were lush and green with the full bloom of late summer, It might have been Virginia in the spring, New Jersey when the fruit trees are in bloom, or Southern California almost any time of the year.
Division Rear was situated on the north shore of Brittany in a lovely little town whose name escapes me, but I can well remember that we drove along the coast past numerous little coves where inviting blue-green water lapped up on clean white sand. The town itself was perched on the very edge of the sea, peaceful, quiet, delightful.
Though the setting was pleasant, a strong feeling of resentment grew within me. These soldiers moving about the town wore the same shoulder patch as my own men, received the same pay, the same promotions, and when they got back home they would be acclaimed as rugged fighting men of a combat division. Yet most of them had never heard a shot fired except on a rifle range. They were clean-shaven, freshly washed, their uniforms pressed. And some of them wore overcoats! I thought of how my men had slept on the ground the night before with wet, clammy raincoats wrapped around them, clad only in field jackets, trying to sleep while they shivered and their teeth chattered. These men lived in squad tents with cots and blankets. They ate good hot food on a three-meals-a-day basis and worked regular office hours with the rest of the time off.
“Guess there’s more than one way to fight a war,” I thought bitterly.
I did see one man though I did not envy. He was Lieutenant Macon Roberts, of my own company. Just before we moved into the Brest fight, Robby had been selected to return to Division Rear to orient new replacements coming to the division. Though he was enjoying his job and the excellent rest he was getting, he could not forget that it was temporary.
“It’s going to be tough to get back in a foxhole after this,” he told me, “especially after you’ve seen how these guys back here are fighting the war and still getting paid for it.”
Finishing my business, I enjoyed another relaxing ride back to the company. Once there, I turned the money over to the other officers so they could be paying the men while I sought a bath. Rather than take the time required for a trip to the showers, I decided to go to the nearby community watering place, where the French had dammed a creek and used the stream for both washing and drinking. It seemed to me that they used it also as a community meeting place, for just as I became fully involved in my bath, the local housewives began arriving with jugs and buckets. I had to duck behind bushes in order to preserve my modesty.
Escaping at last with my modesty virtually intact, I found that a considerable sum of money remained for return to Division Rear. This was because the payroll had been made for all men who were in the company before the attacks on Dinard and Brest. Many of these men had become casualties, some were in the hospitals, some beyond the need of money forever.
The second trip to Division Rear was even more enjoyable than the first because Jack got permission to go with me. We naturally talked a lot of home and made constant comparisons with other journeys we had taken together in the States. Sometimes we stopped along the highway in response to the shouts of French kids and traded cigarettes and candy for fresh eggs, though we generally lost out in the swap.
While I was turning in the cash, Jack had a thorough look at life in the rear echelon,
“It’s wonderful,” he said. “Just like a great big plush-lined foxhole.”
In the morning we climbed into trucks for the ride to the Crozon Peninsula, some 90 miles from our assembly area. The weather was as beautiful as only a French summer can be, and having the tops of the trucks down enabled us to enjoy it thoroughly. Most of the men acted more like they were headed for a picnic than a fight. Everywhere the French people gave us rousing receptions. They lined the roads, crowded the intersections, jammed the villages. At the farm houses whole families would run out to wave vigorously and shout, “Vive les Americains!”
From all sides we received the universal salute of victory started by Prime Minister Churchill of Britain, the upraised hand with fingers outstretched in a symbolic V for Victory, But the happy farmers of Brittany added another gesture Mr. Churchill never thought of. They began to throw apples at us!
It became an enjoyable—but dangerous—game. When added to the speed of our trucks, the apples came like bullets. Sitting on the front seat alongside the river, the windshield open, I had no place to hide from the wild pitches. Sometimes the apples came two or three at a time.
“Reach behind the seat, Lieutenant,” the driver said.
I did, and came up with a baseball glove!
From then it was pitcher to catcher to the men in the rear of the truck for the full 90 miles as farmer after farmer tested his marksmanship. War was something far away, almost forgotten.
But it came back with a rush when the trucks came to a halt beside an open field and we disembarked with orders to dig in and await further instructions for an attack. We were still awaiting orders when word came that religious services were to be held in the next field. It was a Wednesday, but church was something we could not afford to reserve for Sundays—we had to take it whenever we could.
It seemed strange to attend church in an open field with a carbine across my lap and a steel helmet for a pew. On the other hand, this took nothing away from the solemnity of the service. The prayers raised from the fields and foxholes of France that summer could have had no equals in earnestness among all the glorious churches of the world.
We had three chaplains in the regiment, two Protestant and one Catholic. This was according to statistics showing that of a given number of men in a unit, so many would be Protestant, so many others Catholic. Our Protestant chaplains were Captain Neil H. McGeachy, of Fayetteville, N.C., and Captain Maxwell Pullen, a Georgian, Our Catholic chaplain was Captain Peter Wiktor, of Detroit. We lacked a Rabbi, but there again the percentage was the factor that decided whether one was assigned our regiment or not. Yet each division and corps had a certain number of Hebrew chaplains who travelled from unit to unit. Whenever a Rabbi visited our regiment, Jack gathered the Jewish boys together and took them to the services.
The same religious spirit prevailed that had impressed me in the foxholes outside Dinard. It was a common sight to see a long line of men waiting to approach a priest for confession in a quiet end of a field while others of us went about our jobs. Many of my men continued to be engrossed with their prayer books and doing Novenas for the end of the war, although the latter were conspicuously without success. I still prayed for Jack and for myself, while he prayed for me. Thus I felt protected on two sides. It was about this time that something prompted me to look for more complete protection. I wrote to Eleonore, who is Catholic, to send me a small religious medal to wear. I assumed that since my prayers were Protestant, Jack’s Hebrew, and Eleonore’s Catholic, one of us would be sure to have the right approach.
Elsewhere, preparations were moving rapidly for the attack. The fact was, higher headquarters was pushing the jump-off time right down our throats. At the start, the 28th Infantry and the One-Two-One were to attack together along parallel ridges while the gaps between us and on either flank were to be filled by the cavalry and the FFI. My machine gun platoon drew the assignment of protecting the left flank of our battalion. We were to be attached again to Company G, whose commander was still my old friend, Captain Black. The fine job he had done at Dinard had earned Black a promotion.
Just after dark we moved to another assembly area while waiting for Company E to send patrols to secure our line of departure. The patrols ran into trouble almost from the first—one was ambushed and its leader, Second Lieutenant Robert LaPreze, killed. The platoon sergeant also was killed, but a squad leader, Staff Sergeant William F. Hobbs, whom I was to get to know well in subsequent days, reorganized the survivors and completed the mission.
A night move through unfamiliar terrain is always difficult and requires full cooperation from everyone. Unfortunately, on this night Jerry simply would not cooperate. The contact he made with Easy Company’s patrols made him trigger-happy, and bursts of machine gun fire swept the fields intermittently. Only after considerable delay did we finally arrive at the line of departure and lie down to sleep in a cold, drizzling rain.
It stayed cold and foggy all night, so that when morning came only our watches could really tell us when the night had given way to dawn. At 7 A.M. we moved quickly to Company G’s left flank and started forward with the rifle platoons, but within two minutes the Germans opened up with a savage, accurate artillery barrage.
Crawling close to a hedgerow, I pressed as close to the ground as the buttons on my field jacket would allow. I tensed the muscles in my rear end in an attempt to make it as small as possible, for it always seemed that this portion of my anatomy was protruding more than any other. As each shell exploded and the sickening whine of steel fragments filled the air, my stomach seemed to reach up past my head, take hold of my helmet and pull it down over my ears.
But as fierce and concentrated as the artillery attack was, it lasted but five minutes—and we all came through unscathed. I gave the signal to move forward again.
As soon as we came to a place on the flank where our guns could cover a wide stretch of territory, I left one section in place and moved ahead with the rest. As soon as we found an-other spot with good observation and field of fire, we set up, then sent back for the first. This leap-frog technique guaranteed one section in place and ready to fire at all times.
The only thing that slowed our advance was artillery fire. Once when I happened to look well to our left front, I actually spotted some of the enemy’s big guns firing from a finger of land that jutted out into the ocean. I counted the number of flashes, then dived into a deep foxhole ‘to wait for the shells to hit. Certain that I had detected a profitable target for our air and artillery, I hunted an artillery forward observer and pointed out the guns to him. He checked the location on his map and made a few rapid calculations. He finally said that the enemy pieces were out of range of his guns, but he promised to get artillery of longer range to take care of them. They’d be eliminated, he said, before we could say Crozon Peninsula.
We might have said Crozon Peninsula or Wooloomooloo until we were tongue tied if we had waited for either air or artillery to knock out these particular enemy pieces. They were to continue to plague and pepper us all through the battle. They were naval guns, installed by the French before the war in deep concrete casements. They would rise out of the ground to fire, then disappear. Our planes and later our biggest artillery worked to knock them out without success. It remained for the doughboys to dig them out in close combat in what amounted to the last bit of fighting on the peninsula.
Company G meanwhile ran into something more than artillery —intense small-arms fire from automatic weapons, backed up by accurate mortars. To the right of George Company, Easy Company joined the attack but was stopped cold with heavy losses. That meant the entire 2nd Battalion was butting against a solid Jerry line.
Leaving one section of guns to guard our flank, I brought the other two squads up to help Company G’s attempts to advance. The big obstacle was a hill to our front that commanded all the ground around. As the day drew on, we added the fire of our machine guns to the pounding of our artillery on this hill; but each time our riflemen tried to move, Jerry loosed a withering blast of fire. Gradually there built up all around us the inevitable evidences of struggle—wounded men, wrecked equipment, battered buildings.
Determined somehow to break the impasse, I kept a constant vigil on the hill ahead. My efforts finally paid off when I saw the sun glisten on German helmets in a communications trench. Alerting my men quickly, we fired a series of deadly and accurate bursts on the trench. I was crouching close to one of our guns directing the fire of Jerry Schwartz, the gunner.
Suddenly: whoooompff!
The terrific explosion blasted me flat on my back. A mortar shell had landed within two feet of us, directly on the other side of the low hedgerow we were hiding behind. It was almost unbelievable that none of us was hurt. Had the shell landed a foot closer it would have cleared the hedgerow and been in our hip pockets, a foot farther away and the nasty, deadly bits of broken metal would have flown over the hedgerow to hit us full in the face.
“That sonofabitch had an eye like an eagle,” said Jerry Schwartz. “A few inches closer and they’d be picking up our dog tags right now.”
The German mortar fire had also come close to the other three guns, but the accuracy that had amazed Schwartz and me was not quite so evident at the other weapons. The best the Germans could claim was a small thigh wound on Sergeant Edwards. But it was only a small sliver of metal, easily extracted, and Edwards stayed with us.
Suddenly we realized Jerry’s mortar fire had been a parting gesture. The Germans came streaming down the hill, flying a white flag. Captain Black quickly took command of the situation and sent a platoon of riflemen ahead to occupy the hill. Since darkness was rapidly approaching, he decided not to risk sending his entire company or my machine gun platoon for-ward, for Easy Company on our right still had been unable to advance.
In the early gloom that night, as I made my way about while checking on various details, I saw a man on his knees praying. I carefully detoured past him, but as I passed again on the way back, I noted the man was still there in the same position, bent over at the waist with his hands flat against his face. This time I looked more closely. To my horror I discovered that a piece of shell had torn off a side of the man’s skull.
I could only hope that he really had been praying when the shell had come from out of nowhere to end his life.
This experience was a forerunner of a hectic night to come. The fierce routine noises of battle were nerve-wracking enough, but to add to these, somewhere near us a wounded German began to call out. For what seemed like interminable hours he filled the air with pitiful howls for help. “Herr Oberst!” he called. “Herr Oberst!” We could not help but feel sympathetic after all, he was a human, and he was hurt, but we dared not go to his assistance for fear it just might be a trap.
Herr Oberst never came. The sounds grew weaker and eventually died out.
Near midnight the Germans swiftly and furiously counter-attacked the platoon of Company G which had occupied that part of the hill which they had surrendered in late afternoon. But there was nothing we could do to help. The men were kicked off the position and were back with the bulk of the company almost before anyone else knew what was happening.
As one might expect, however, out of some of the most serious situations come some of the drollest experiences. The Jerry counterattack that night provided us with one of these—pathetic, yet not without humor.
Sometime during the noisy night I dropped off into a shivering sleep when Perkins, my messenger, touched me on the shoulder. I awoke with a start.
“Shhhhhh,” Perkins cautioned. “You hear anything?”
I tried to listen even as I adjusted myself to the sudden shock of waking. Finally I made out a weak, plaintive voice.
“Pat!” the voice called. “Hey, Pat! Where are you, Pat?”
We listened intently, holding our breaths so we might hear every word.
“Hey, fellas, wait for me!” the voice continued, almost in a sob. “Wait for me! Please don’t leave me! Hey, Pat!”
The voice drew slowly closer. It trembled, it pleaded, it broke, it almost seemed to weep.
“Hey, Pat! Wait for me. Hey, fellas!”
Cautioning my men against shooting, I crept slowly toward the sound. I waited until I was close on the man before I commanded him to halt. When he came to an excited, jittery stop, I could see that he was wearing our uniform, but when asked the password, he was too nervous to remember.
I finally made out that the man was from Company G’s first platoon which had been on the hill, and he had lost his squad and his squad leader, Pat Riley. Satisfied at last that he was a GI, I led him back to our positions. He shook and trembled so we put him in a foxhole and covered the entire hole with a raincoat to enable him to have a smoke and go to sleep. When morning came, he was better and made his way to his platoon.
For weeks after that, my platoon’s watchword was, “Hey, fellas ! Wait for me!”
I could hear it almost everywhere I went, sometimes even in the thick of battle rising above all other sounds, and never did it fail to amuse me. Perhaps it was cruel to laugh at the plight of another soldier, but this never entered our minds.
“Hey, fellas! Hey, Pat! Wait for me!”