We finally go through the Siegfried Line and start a great end run across Germany. We’re moving so fast they pile us into two ton trucks. We go along faster than tanks. Sometimes, we come to a town and there will be German civilians in them. There’s been no chance for the civilian population to evacuate. These towns have never been bombed. Some of them are still there, complete with women and children.
We first do what we call ‘clearing’ in each town. This means going through each house, cellars and all, seeing that there are no soldiers hiding. As we roll into these towns, armed to the teeth, there are often women at the windows. Some guys just head for the women, some look for booze, wine or schnapps, and some go after silver or gold. Everybody has his particular loot. We’re way ahead of the MPs, so nobody’s stopping us.
I get to be real expert at finding where the Germans hide their jewels. Usually they’re in dinky safes behind paintings. I blow the locks off with my rifle. My rationale is they’ve probably stolen all this stuff from the Poles, the French or the Jews from all the countries where they’ve ravaged, robbed and killed. We think of ourselves as the great liberators, ‘liberating’ all this loot.
Now I know more about it. I realise I often was taking their personal property and many times this property had sentimental and family value to them. But I was nineteen years old, a scared and unwilling dogface soldier, working myself up to being a mercenary. I didn’t want to work the rest of my life if I could avoid it. If I could bring some of this stuff home and sell it, I’d have a real nest egg.
I did learn to pop diamonds and other precious stones from their settings like popcorn. I don’t want the settings, just the gems. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, anything that looks valuable I shove in my field jacket pockets as fast as I can. I abandon the settings, just move right through the houses, one after the other. I don’t touch anybody. People are too scared to say much. Sometimes they try to resist, mostly women and old men, but not much. We’re worse than the Russians, all right.
Every evening I take these jewels and, using the little cloth patches we use to clean our rifle barrels, sew my day’s haul into the inside of my combat field pack.
Finally, after our great wild run, we settle down for a few days. There’s one kid in our outfit whose father is a jeweller. He sees what I’m doing and peers over my collection.
‘Good God, Wharton, you’ve got a fortune there! I wish I’d thought of that, it’s the smartest thing of all. It’s loot you can probably get home.’
He looks carefully through what I have.
‘I don’t care what fence you go to. That stuff is worth ten thousand dollars or more, easy. And since you don’t have the settings, nobody can identify them. Only be careful, wait a while after the war before you try to sell any of it.’
I’m also thinking of putting these gems inside the filter can of a German gas mask. That would be classified as just a souvenir, no trouble. There are quite a few gas masks we’ve gotten from the Germans. They’re a crazy kind of souvenir, almost as crazy as the poor Krauts hauling them all over Europe, but everyone is sending one back, maybe for Halloween they could be used as masks. We’d all ditched the huge packet that was our own gas mask long ago.
I figure I’ll take the charcoal out, mix the stones in, then put it back together again. I have my plan all worked out, but I don’t get to do it that way.