PATTON’S ARMY
By the end of January, the Western Allies had regained the ground they’d lost in the Bulge. Poised on the frontier of Germany, they regrouped for a new push to Berlin. The Soviet Red Army, meanwhile, had arrived in Warsaw and crossed into East Prussia on the eastern border of Germany. Hitler, holed up in a Berlin bunker, gave orders forbidding retreat without his approval, but units retreated anyway.
Already deep on German soil, General Courtney Hodges’s First Army crossed the Rhine in early March during the Battle of Remagen, a city on the western bank of the river. German combat engineers failed to blow the Ludendorff Bridge; our guys seized it.
Holding the bridge gave our troops a way to penetrate the last natural boundary between them and Germany’s heartland. Realizing how important the crossing was, the German army spent the next several days trying to destroy it. Their attacks ranged from armored assaults to mortar salvos, floating mines, and, according to some, the first tactical bombing mission of a jet-engined bomber, Germany’s Arado Ar 234B-2. All failed. First Army expanded the bridgehead, opening the way for a flood of troops.
Operating to First Army’s south, General Patton’s Third Army reached the Rhine on March 21; Patton had six battalions across before the sun rose March 23. A bridge was thrown up by combat engineers, and the Americans now had a second major crossing, one that led to southern Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic.
The rapid advances by the Allies had not spared the civilian populations, even though they weren’t directly targeted. Farms, villages, cities suffered as the armies wrestled.
The destruction was remarkable. It even moved Patton, not known for his compassion toward the enemy, to pity. In a letter to his wife March 23, he told her:
The displaced person is a problem. They are streaming back utterly forlorn. I saw one woman with a perambulator full of her worldly goods sitting by it on a hill crying. An old man with a wheelbarrow and three little children wringing his hands. A woman with five children and a tin cup crying. In hundreds of villages there is not a living thing, not even a chicken. Most of the houses are heaps of stones. They brought it on themselves, but these poor peasants are not responsible.
And then, as often with Patton, he had another thought:
I am getting soft? I did most of it.
It was the terrible ambiguity of the war, of all wars—to do what had to be done, many who weren’t “guilty” had to suffer.
* * *
Like Hodges’s First Army, Patton’s Third consisted of different corps, each composed of infantry and armored divisions and smaller, specialized units. By late spring 1945, well over half a million men and eighteen divisions were in the Third Army, advancing across the southern portion of Germany.
During the first week of April, an armored strike force from the 4th Division had attempted to capture Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. Driving deep into Germany, they missed the key Nazi commander. Instead, they discovered a Nazi extermination or death camp in Ohrdruf. There were more than 3,200 naked bodies in shallow graves. Ohrdruf was a satellite of Buchenwald, a massive German concentration complex whose satellites or sub-camps were used to hold, exterminate, and work to death over a quarter million people, from Jews to political prisoners to prisoners of war.
It was the first concentration camp liberated by American forces. It would not be the last.
THE RETREAT
I was somewhere to the east of the Third Army’s advance, though I had no idea that they were headed in my direction. Each night I moved westward as far as I dared, and as far as my legs and fear would take me. My ambushes so far didn’t make me more confident; they had almost the opposite effect, as if I thought I had only a certain amount of luck, and feared I’d used it all.
I wasn’t as hungry as I’d been as the days went on. Or maybe I was, but had learned to put the feeling aside. I felt so much else that a hunger pang barely registered.
I can’t even tell you what else I did those days, pushing through southern Germany. Mostly I avoided people.
* * *
I’d holed up in a wooded copse to hide in one night when I heard artillery again. This was loud, and I knew from the sound it was ours. It got louder and louder, and at dawn I heard noises I hadn’t heard before—people traveling along the road.
Civilians. Fleeing with everything they had.
I was about a hundred yards away, maybe a little more, from the road—close enough to see what was happening without being seen. I looked out from the brush and saw people streaming down the road, some with horse-drawn wagons and carts. They were moving fast.
Two hours later, I saw infantry moving down the road.
German soldiers. A lot of them. Hundreds, on foot and in trucks.
Then tanks and mobile guns. Eighty-eights. It was a long column of troops, obviously beating a hasty retreat.
I was so amazed at what I was seeing that I didn’t even think to hide myself. I suppose anyone seeing me from that distance would think I was just a civilian. I stood and stared, barely comprehending as a buzz in the distance grew. The sound was an airplane, a small one—I looked above and spotted a little Piper Cub spotter plane circling.
Cleary, he was looking for these guys.
The Germans were smart. They didn’t fire at the little plane, knowing it would tell the spotter where they were.
But it didn’t matter. Ten minutes later, maybe fifteen, artillery shells began falling on the road. The column was still passing through. A shell hit a tank, wrecking it and forcing the column to stop.
Shells kept falling on the road as I cowered. I was far enough from the road—and whoever was firing the artillery had good enough coordinates and fire discipline—that I wasn’t hit. But plenty of Germans were. I heard cries of pain, desperate pleas.
The Germans who weren’t killed managed to keep going, escaping with their wounded.
* * *
I felt no sorrow for them, no compassion. But I didn’t feel any joy, either. I felt nothing. I’d grown to understand war and survival completely.
* * *
The fires burned into the night. I stayed where I was.
I woke the next morning to the sound of tanks coming down the road. I got up, thinking at first that they were more German tanks. But the shapes were wrong.
Our tanks. American tanks.
I was too scared to move. It wouldn’t have made sense—these guys would have shot at anything in the road or nearby, I’m sure. I stayed where I was, hunkered down as they pursued the Germans. I’m sure they knew they weren’t far ahead.
The Americans quickly pushed and towed the wrecked German vehicles off the road. Trucks followed with infantrymen.
A few hours passed. I stayed where I was. I didn’t want some trigger-happy guy to shoot me because I didn’t know the password. After you’ve been in combat a while, you don’t think twice about shooting.
Things died down, and I started making my way toward the road, a few yards at a time, not sure yet how to make contact.
Finally, a Jeep with a single radioman came up the road. He stopped to take a look and maybe make a radio call.
That was my chance. If he was occupied with the radio, he’d be less likely to shoot me. Especially with the rifle in the Jeep out of reach, or at least out of my sight.
I snuck out of the brush, walking as quietly as I could, and tapped him on the shoulder.
He just about jumped to the clouds.
“What are you doing? Where are you going?” the radioman demanded.
He took a breath, calming down, realizing I guess that I wasn’t out to kill him. Then his eyes just about crossed.
“You look like a ragman,” he said.
“I’m an American,” I told him. “I escaped from a prison camp. I’m an American. Help me.”
MEMORY
Thinking back on this now, it all seems incredible. The two weeks of being a savage, the column of Germans, the attack.
Did it all happen exactly as I remember?
I believe so. Some of it, I think, was worse.
A few of the details now are jumbled in my memory. I was further or closer to this and that. I saw bits and pieces of things, and my mind supplied the rest. Details have slipped away—or maybe hid themselves from the part of the brain that can’t take such horror.
I know I was very lucky. So many times I could have been killed, and not just by the Germans. A stray bomb, a shell, the man in the Jeep. I could have slipped in the stream, hit my head, and drowned unconscious. If I’d been in a more important place with bigger towns, or if the soldiers stationed there had been more competent or better trained, I’d have met my match within a day or two. Had I been captured a year earlier and then escaped, the Germans would have put a lot more effort into capturing me. With the Allies pressing in from all sides, I wasn’t really worth the effort.
* * *
The radioman put me in his Jeep and took me back to his headquarters.
I can’t tell you which unit it was. It must have been about four miles back from where I’d been picked up.
The captain there looked at me and said, “You look like a sorry mess.”
I had to agree. I told him what had happened. I’d gone maybe a hundred miles and spent two weeks ravaging the countryside.
Guesses.
I don’t remember any questions about whether I was an American or not, let alone suspicions that I might be a spy. No one even asked to see my dog tags. It was probably pretty obvious I was an American from the way I spoke, and my guess is that at that point in the war, our guys weren’t too worried about spies.
Intel on the enemy was a different matter. The captain asked me a few questions about what I’d seen. It must have been obvious that I had no information that could help them, because our conversation didn’t last all that long. He gave me a new uniform and let me clean up a bit.
The unit had picked up some other escapees and sent them back to France; he said he’d send me there, too. There was an airstrip not all that far away; another Jeep ride, and I was looking at a C-47 being packed with the wounded. They took me along, and a few hours and another plane ride or two later, I was in France.
Free France.
LUCKY STRIKE
I was taken to a camp called Lucky Strike.
Lucky Strike was the name of a very popular brand of cigarettes, before, during, and after the war. In this case, its name had been appropriated by a large base originally set up to help process soldiers as they were being brought into Europe. It was one of several “cigarette camps” with similar missions, so named because most were given the names of popular brands of cigarettes. There was Pall Mall, Philip Morris, Old Gold, and a few others.
The camps were near Marseilles in the south, and Le Havre in the north; both cities were major ports that were used to ship troops into the fight. Lucky Strike was in Normandy near Saint-Valery at San Riquie en Caux.
Things had changed a lot in northwestern France since I’d been there eight or nine months before. Then this place had been a German airfield, probably a prime target for bombers in the buildup to the landings. Now it was a mass of canvas tents—American tents, American soldiers, American doctors, and even nurses. The camp’s purpose was evolving from an entrance to Europe to an exit; it had begun processing POWs liberated from the western portion of Germany in March. It would eventually handle thousands of men a week as they shipped home, but when I arrived it was relatively quiet.
The first thing the docs at the camp did when I arrived was delouse me. My clothes were burned, and I was showered with DDT, the Army’s standard delousing chemical during the war. I took a real shower—boy did that water feel good. I stayed under so long I’m sure I was waterlogged. Then I got dressed in the new uniform they gave me, and went for something to eat.
Solid food and a lot of it was what I wanted. I wasn’t just hungry; I was famished. I weighed 90 pounds when I arrived. Compare that to the 150 when I left for England.
The doctors and nurses were very nice. They were also very smart. Rather than telling me that I had to build my weight up slowly, they let me eat anything I wanted that first day.
Anything?
I ate it all: hamburgers, milk shakes, whatever. They kept the food coming.
Sure enough, I got really sick, really fast.
From there on, I was ready to listen to their advice.
They were extremely kind, the nurses especially. I went exploring. Lucky Strike was more like a city than an army camp. You could get lost in it—but it had to be big, as it had housed close to sixty thousand at its peak. There was a bar, a movie theater, and of course a fully equipped field hospital. I didn’t have it to myself, and I wouldn’t say the place was empty, but there weren’t nearly so many men that it felt crowded.
I drank a lot of milk shakes—slowly—and quickly added weight. Good food—rich soups, thick steaks. The first steaks I had in Europe. Aside from being exhausted and well underweight, I was in what the doctors declared was surprisingly decent shape despite my time in the mines and prison camp. The Germans who had operated on me in Paris had done a very good job removing the shrapnel. I still had pieces near my spine. While those could only be removed in a better-equipped facility, I was in no immediate danger from them. The Army would take care of that after I gained a little more strength.
I didn’t write home. I figured I’d be home before the mail got there.
And what would I have said anyway?
They kept me at the camp maybe three weeks, waiting for me to get a little more fat on my bones. They interrogated me on what I’d been through. I told them everything I could remember; I doubt now it was of much use to them, but I certainly hoped it would be at the time.
Finally, I was issued new orders—report to a hospital in Texas and prepare to give up the metal the Germans had put in my back. In the meantime, I was to enjoy a sixty-day furlough, as well as an all-expenses-paid trip back to the States via airplane.
I found my plane and happily headed home. For some reason I didn’t stop to call or telegraph my parents or Arlene that I was on my way. I just went.
HOME
My plane landed in New York. I checked in at camp, then soon was on my way by train to Chicago and finally the local to Clinton.
I got off in the middle of the day. Clinton had changed in the two years or so since I’d been gone, but not so much that I couldn’t find my way home. I found a bus and headed to the house.
My youngest sister was playing outside when I got off and walked across the railroad tracks. She saw me and ran into the house to tell my mom.
“I think Heinie’s home.”
The family hadn’t received any word that I had escaped, let alone that I had reached our lines, been rescued, spent time in the hospital, or was coming home. The war in Europe was still raging. As far as they knew, I was dead. Or maybe in a prison camp somewhere.
I stopped in the yard, taking it in. I’d seen the house so many times in my mind. It looked exactly the same.
I walked to the door, opened it.
There was no rush of excitement, no big hugs or kisses. My mother said hello. That was it. My dad just shrugged. “You’re back.”
It was as if I’d just gone down to the store to grab a bottle of milk and come back.
Yet it didn’t seem odd to me at all. That was the way my family was. There were no big signs of emotion. Or anything else—I’d get all of that and more from Arlene.
Kisses and hugs and more—nothing X-rated, but so much love when I found her at home a few hours later that I felt a thrill beyond anything, beyond falling from planes, beyond even surviving.