Last week in Granddad blogging, my grandfather and a few others were ordered to hold a bridge against the German Tiger tanks. This week, he gets a brief respite, fresh clothes and the offer of a hot cup of coffee.
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Course we were wet and cold and everything else and in a little while here come a bunch of trucks and they load about half of us on these trucks and take us back three or four miles. And they’d set up a great big tent back there and they had dry clothes back there and extra rifles and everything and hot coffee.
Well, at that particular time I didn’t drink coffee. I didn’t want any coffee. So I got my dry clothes on and got my rifle and got to lookin’ around and saw what they were doing. When they got the coffee they’d load ‘em right back on those trucks and they were gonna take ‘em and put ‘em right back on the line again. Well, three or four more of us saw what was going on so we just eased out under the side of the tent and didn’t go get any coffee and therefore didn’t get in those trucks.
And we went back down in the town somewhere, I don’t know where it was and went in this town and took our blankets and hung ‘em up over the windows, tore the panelling off the walls and built a big fire in some stoves and went to sleep and woke up the next morning.
In daylight we were a little worried, maybe we had deserted, maybe – we didn’t know what. So we decided we better get out and find our company. There wasn’t hardly anybody in this town and we finally saw some MP s and told them we were lookin’ for George Company and they said “Man, George Company’s about five miles down the road.” And we were five miles closer to the front than our company was. So we walked all day long getting back to our company. And there wasn’t much hardly anybody left in our company. But we got a few replacements in and we're back, we’re gonna attack the Colmar canal and go into Colmar.
Now the Battle of Bulge was going on up on the right toward Belgium and Holland and we’re way down on the left close to Switzerland. But we didn’t know all of this. WE were supposed to go across this canal. I don’t know exactly what happened, yeah I do, too. That’s where our first lieutenant and a bunch of people got killed with a shell or two. This was on the second day of February, ‘cause I was sittin out there in the woods it was real bright- sunshiney – wondering if the groundhog in Lawrenceburg was gonna see his shadow.
And here come a shell and WHAM – it killed the only commissioned officer we had – a First Lieutenant and I never did see any blood on him. I reckon the concussion killed him. But there were shells landing on other people and wounded them pretty bad and killed some of ‘em, I don’t know. And that’s when I thought I had got hit because I felt a sting go in the back of my shoulder and being that cold you can’t imagine how many clothes we had on to stay warm, but we had a lot of ‘em on. So I started to peelin’ ‘em off and get a man to help me get em off and got down to my shoulder and there a piece of steel about the length of a needle and half the size- no, maybe about the size of a fountain pin point stuck in my clothes into my shoulder, but didn’t break the skin. So not only did I not get a million dollar wound to get to come back home, but I didn’t even get a Purple Heart.
So for some reason, the Sergeant took over, there were no commissioned officers and he said we’re supposed to go this way. And we went that way and went down to that canal, there wasn’t anybody to give orders or tell us what to do and another little boy, he was much shorter than I were together then. I don’t know how we got together but we did so we decided we’d dig us a hole and get in it and get to sleep. The ground was frozen and it was hard and we dug a hole about a fourth as deep as you’re supposed to and he got in the hole and layed down and I layed down on top of him and we both went to sleep. And now that’s where you get killed, when you get careless and don’t watch your hole or pull guard duty or anything. But that’s what we did. We didn’t really care.
And we woke up the next morning and there was the biggest fire fight going on you ever heard in your life. And we were right down on this canal and really didn’t know we were that close to it. And there was another company coming through attacking the barges on this canal. And I reckon they must have gone on across, I don’t know.
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3 comments:
This is a great idea and a great read, VA.
My grandfather is still alive, but he doesn't want to talk about the war. He was at Normandy and served as a jeep driver in the motorpool. He drove for a number of different generals as the army made its way from coastal France to Berlin and survived many bombings and sniper attacks along the way. He is rumored to have driven Patton once, but he doesn't want to talk about even that.
The funny thing about his service is that he grew up in an extremely rural part of Mississippi and had never been behind the wheel of a car before he was drafted and assigned to the motorpool.
I can't recommend taking his oral history more. It was a great experience for me and now that he's gone it's really precious.
There is a little more War history, but in fact I have loads more stuff that I'll be publishing about family history, his life growing up in Wilson Co, TN, his time at UT in the 30s, and so on. So even if your grandfather won't talk about the war, get the other stuff.
He spent time in the WPA working on different parks, bridges, and roads in Mississippi and Arizona before being drafted, and we have talked about that part of his life. The Mississippi childhood before that is also interesting.
My favorite sory of his is when he first saw a car. He was 14. It was a model-A Ford, and he and his brother noticed it's unfamiliar tracks along the dirt road (many of the roads there still aren't paved) and followed them to the guy's house a couple of miles away.
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