The Rolling Coffin

……On another mission, we had to take over a winery the enemy had in their control. After taking over the winery, many of the wine vats still contained some wine. Some of the fellows started guzzling down the wine, filling up their canteens and anything that would hold liquid. A sergeant found an old douche bag with a hose and connected it to  vat, #69. He lay down on the concrete floor putting the tube in his mouth and opened the spigot, out came the wine. All of us slept in the winery that night; I managed to find a place to sleep behind a wine vat and was doing pretty good until a big rat kept crawling over my face and body. I tried to hit it with my helmet, but missed. I got my tent shelter half and jammed it into the hole the rat was inside of. Would you believe it, the rat ate up my shelter half.

The men started waking up and walking around when one of the guys spotted the Sgt lying on the floor, the tube was out of his mouth, and the wine was running all over the place. We picked him and his rifle up and put him in the half-track, covered him with some tarp, because if any of our officers would see him in this condition, they would have taken his stripes and more.

It must be understood our company was always at the battle frontline. No matter how far we would pull back from the enemy, no one was in front of us, but the enemy.

….I will explain how the tunnel was built; a hole about eighteen inches in circumference was cut out of the concrete floor with a sturdy knife blade. After it was removed, the cover and the existing concrete around the hole were finished off evenly with cement purchased with cigarettes from a French soldier. The sand was taken out at night by filling up the pant legs and walking to the latrine dropping some. The reason it was done at night was due to the sand from the tunnel being darker than the sand in the compound. The lumber to shore up the tunnel was taken from an air raid shelter in the compound.

The antenna wire for the radio came from inside the tunnel to the bottom of the wooden bunks two by four’s, to the wooden roof beam. To conceal this wire, a knife blade was placed into the wood, cutting a groove a little deeper than the wire, pressing it into the cut, and then pressing the open groove together over the wire, concealing it. It was not very long before we acquired another radio. In fact, we had a radio on the death march.

…. One of the G.I.s got the bright idea to steal the gates. This occurred during the later part of the war when we had older guards who were not very sharp. In the camp were many soldiers who could speak the German language fluently. It was arranged for two men to speak to this guard, keeping him busy while the rest of us mingled in front of the entrance blocking his view of the open gates. Believe it or not, they were removed and put into the air raid shelter in the rear of a barracks.

Everyone slowly left the immediate area and went to the two end barracks to observe the guard closing the gates. The reason we left as soon as possible was the guard might just start shooting at anyone near the gate.