Granddad blogging: Tiger Tanks

Last week in Granddad blogging, my grandfather describes his time in the Colmar Pocket and taking prisoners. This week, the fighting heats up, and he and a few men hold out against the force of the German Tiger Tanks.

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Then we moved again, we go somewhere, I don’t even know where, right down close to the Colmar canal. I later found out, I didn’t know it then. And they told us we were going to attack some Germans up in the woods up there. That the Germans had tanks and that we had tanks and they took a whole bunch of people and sent them across a little stream and bridge to go up there to attack these Germans up there.

And our company was the last company that was to go up. We were the reserve, this company, we were to hold. So they all go up there, and then here comes the tanks – our tanks – went across this little bridge. The Engineers were up there and they argue around and they finally decide that it’s stout enough to hold us and the tanks and so they said to go on across. They did and they got right in the middle of the bridge and down she went.

Well all of our whole regiment was up ahead of us and another regiment too, I think there were a whole lot of soldiers were up there and we were the last thing. So they carried us across that little river, or we had to walk across it and they told us to dig in. And the little anti-tank gun – 47 mm – one and I don’t know – probably a dozen of us in this platoon dug in five or six holes. Two men to a hole, three to a hole, something like that. And they said you all stay right here and hold. You’re the rear guard.

Well, just about dark here come a bunch of soldiers back through us. And we say “What you all doing? What you coming back for?” They said “Well the Germans got tanks up there and we don’t got any tanks. We can’t fight those tanks.” Well, OK.

In a little bit, we looked up and here come another bunch and we asked them and they said “The tanks are coming. The tanks are coming.” And they’re running back, running back and we call our headquarters and ask ‘em if we can come back. And they said “No sir, you stay right there til everybody up there in that woods gets through. And when they get through then we’ll call y’all back.”

Well, so we stayed. I’d never seen a German tank. I didn’t know what they looked like. But I heard the durndest racket coming down out of the woods and there were two great big old German tiger tanks. And we didn’t do anything. We just looked at them.

But that little anti-tank gun, it shot at one of them and missed it. So he raised his sights up a little and shot at it again and hit it just as center as you could hit one. And it was just like you hit it with a BB gun. It just bounced off. The old German turned around and fired one shot at that anti-tank gun and I can remember seeing the gun and the people and everything else going up in there.

And here comes the tank on down to right where that gun was and they get out of the tank and they’re yakking and talking about something – I don’t know what. But sum total and substance of it was that they’re gonna look up down this river and see if there’s anything else. There were three of us there, and we knew we couldn’t stay there. We’d be killed or captured one. So we threw everything away, but two grenades a piece. Our rifles our packs, everything. I kept a fountain pen, for some reason, that I’d brought with me. That’s the last thing I had left that I’d brought from the States. And we were gonna swim that river.

Well that little old river wasn’t but about neck deep, so we just waded across that little old river and snow was five or six feet deep – maybe that’s too much. It was deep, on the other side of the river. So we get across the river and we laid down and we crawled through that snow back to that bridge where the tanks are broken down.

We later found out that a lot of the soldiers that retreated across the bridge were killed because the Germans had zeroed in on it with machine guns when they went across they shot ‘em off this bridge. Including the boy whose hair I’d cut about an hour before. But when we get to the bridge the Germans had quit shootin’ at it for some reason and we go on across and there are quite a few soldiers lined up on the other side of the bridge. I reckon they were expecting the Germans to counter attack or something, I don’t know what. But they told us to get there, too.

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