The area was littered with German casualties. Policy declared that prisoners must cast off their helmets. I seized the helmet strap of a wounded German and tried to wrest it off. He groaned in pain. Then I saw a bullet hole in his helmet and what looked like blood and brains seeping out. He was seriously wounded and probably near death. I left him alone. A slightly wounded German was leaning against a tree. I pointed my rifle at him while, with genuine curiosity, I examined his attire and equipment. "Nicht schiessen" ("Don't shoot"), he pleaded and dissolved in tears. Another man had been shot in the genitals and was in great distress. I moved on. There were other scenes of equal misery to witness.
I later rejoined my unit. Escorted by tanks, we crossed an adjacent field toward more woods, at whose edge was another bunker. The tanks offered protection, and their treads compacted the sodden earth, making walking easier. The bunker was empty, but a tank fired at close range, blowing chunks of concrete from its face, exposing the reinforcing rods within. We bore right, to the north side of the forest and found two more bunkers, also unoccupied--fortunately, since the tanks had now left. The bunkers faced a barren field stretching to the brink of a cliff, whose ominous feature was an observation cupola. En route, I found myself walking with my platoon leader, ahead of our main body. If that cupola is manned, I said, we were in trouble even if we threw ourselves down. He had thought of that, too, but we had no choice.
I had another problem. Earlier, I had tried to open my rifle's bolt to replace the two remaining rounds with a full clip. It would not budge, even after grounding the butt and bringing my heel down hard on the handle. It had turned much colder, and all the mud and water coating my rifle had frozen. I was afraid it might explode if I fired.
At the cupola, we were atop yet another bunker set into the cliff and commanding the wide plain below. This bunker was also empty. I stuck my rifle muzzle into the observation port, turned my head and fired. The slug careened off the sides of the bunker. The bolt was safely freed.
We milled around the area. It was sunset, the skies had cleared, and there was a bitter wind. From the cliff's edge we could see far across the plain into Germany. We withdrew to the forest edge and the two bunkers. In a belt before the bunkers stood a knee-high barbed-wire thicket, twenty feet deep and traversed by crooked paths. A tank barrier ten feet deep lay before the wire--rails set six feet below ground, probably in concrete, and extending four feet above ground. Before these obstacles lay a fifteen-foot open tract ending in a low ledge atop which began the plain that stretched to the cliff. We were to dig in against the ledge and await a counterattack.
Four of us began digging a shallow pit into the ledge as darkness fell. I shivered constantly, still wet from fording the stream that morning, the earlier rains, and my long session pinned down in the forest. The other GIs were equally miserable. Digging was hard in the frozen ground, but at last we all stretched face down in our new abode, wondering about a counterattack.
Then came a creeping barrage of German 88mm artillery rounds. In wordless anxiety, we felt the shells coming closer. A shell fell almost on us, but there was no explosion; it was a dud. The barrage continued over us, then ceased. There was no counterattack. And with those last shells, my first day in combat ended.
My experiences that day, November 25, 1944, were quite humble, but they made a profound impression on me. Curiously, for decades afterward I rarely thought about them, although they loomed prominently in the back of my mind. Now, in my indolent retirement, the day has assumed a special place. It was so filled with events I could not have imagined that later combat experiences, quite stressful themselves, have receded from memory, though hardly forgotten. The experiences of others on their first day of combat may well have been worse, but on my first day I stared death in the face more than once and behaved, I believe, with reasonable calmness and resolve. I am content with those thoughts.
Additional Sources:
wing.chez.tiscali.fr
www.80thdivision.com
www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Quarters/6882
www.army.mil
