My Lonely Walk Through Hell

To me the most horrible thing was to be under artillery shellfire.  I felt absolutely helpless.  Some artillery pieces were large enough to launch a shell the size of a full-grown hog.  The damn thing came in like a freight train, there was a terrific crash, the ground shook, and shrapnel ripped through the air.  Sitting helplessly under this intense artillery fire was pure hell, combat at its absolute worst.

I''ve seen many 20-year olds and younger in the middle of all the missiles flying around, but I never saw anybody who looked much under 40 while the fighting was going on.  It made men out of boys overnight.  Then when things got really thick, I saw people get hit and drop, crying out with pain, and I saw the wild look in their eyes and the flesh around their mouths shake as if they were whimpering. 

It was a known fact that the guy who talked the toughest, bragged the most, and was the top soldier in the company, was the first to break down in combat or the first to faint when receiving shots.  The soft-spoken kid, who was hardly noticed in camp, was the standout in combat.  I could always tell whether men were moving up or coming back from the line.  They had a different look, dull, sightless eyes showing the strain and shock of what they had seen and been through. 

At the end of many of those days, no matter how weary we were, we dug foxholes, usually with a buddy.  It would take over an hour for two men to chop a shallow hole in the frozen ground, but most of the time it was necessary to stay alive.  In the process, we would strike big rocks and tree roots that would discourage us, but that couldn''t deter our efforts.  In case of enemy shelling or artillery or mortar attack, we had a fifty percent better chance for survival.  In fact, no matter how hungry we were, we would never break out our C-rations (canned pork and beans, hash, and spaghetti) or K-rations (crackers or cheese, "ersatz" lemonade powder, and Fleetwood cigarettes, a brand never heard of before or since) before we had ourselves fortified in the ground.  There was no hot food on the front.  Fires were forbidden because of smoke in the daytime or light from a fire at night.

Both the American and German dead lay frozen when the grave registration units came to pick them up, piling them in trucks like cords of wood.  The frozen arms and legs got in their way when they were piling them, but everyone who had experienced this in the summer before, coming through France, commented on how nice it was that the battlefield didn''t stink.  Then bodies had been lying for some days in the hot sun.  They had turned black and swelled up into grotesque shapes as the gases inside expanded, until the carcasses finally burst through the uniforms. 

On one occasion during the Battle of the Bulge, the Air Force spotted a column of German artillery, moving on a deserted road through a forested area, pulling about 15 artillery pieces with horses, which was quite common since gasoline was a scarce commodity in the German army.  When the P-38s got through strafing this column, we were within a short distance, watching the destruction.  We were then ordered to move in and capture what few German soldiers were still alive or hiding in the woods. 

There was a loud screaming which was hard to distinguish, but as we got near, we could see large clumps squirming around.  They were wounded horses, but not all of them. Some were galloping away in the distance, falling down, then running further.  The belly of one was ripped open, the guts trailing out.  He became tangled in them, fell, and stood up again.  A gunner in one of our tanks put the animal out of its misery with a .30 caliber machine gun.  Another horse was propped on his front forelegs, dragging himself around in a circle like a merry-go-round, apparently with a broken back.  A soldier ran up and shot it; slowly it sank to the ground with a dying sigh.

One day, a first lieutenant asked me to make preparations and ready my jeep to take him to the front lines as an observer, which was about 10 miles through a heavily wooded area.  The weather was cloudy and occasionally misting.  As we approached the combat area, we had to abandon our vehicle because we were receiving small arms fire, so we hid in the hedgerow for cover.  Shortly after that, the lieutenant told me that he would return later and that I should return to my company by myself.  Little did I realize what lay ahead of me that night. 

When I entered the wooded area, there were several crossroads that I didn’t recognize as being the same route I had driven earlier.  It was beginning to get dark.  I was getting more confused and finally lost my sense of direction, so I pulled my jeep into the woods, under cover, to spend a long night by myself. 

The early hours were quite tolerable until I started to get sleep