CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE BREAKING POINT
Every man has a breaking point.
—FELIX SPARKS
American shells land on the village of Reipertswiller, January 1945. [National Archives]
DAWN BROKE ON THE first day of 1945. The sun pierced the heavy mist and dark clouds but then quickly disappeared. All along the thinly held Seventh Army lines, shells whistled and screamed. Operation Northwind had begun. By sundown, eight German divisions, including more than thirty thousand SS, were storming west through the high mountain passes and valleys of the Vosges, headed toward Strasbourg.
Along with the rest of the 45th Division, Sparks and his battalion retreated to defensive positions ten miles to their rear. There was little panic even though heavy Germany shelling continued as they withdrew in trucks to Reipertswiller, a small village in France. It was painful to pass through ruined towns that had been so hard-won and were now to be ceded back to the enemy. Thunderbirds cursed bitterly. Having to turn their backs and return to France without putting up a fight felt wrong. “It is getting hard to know who wants to keep us from reaching the Rhine,” complained their new division commander, General Frederick. “Ike or the Krauts.” In some of the villages that had to be abandoned, bewildered French children threw icy snowballs at the departing Thunderbirds.
For the next ten days fighting raged in the Vosges as more than one hundred thousand enemy troops fought to break through the Seventh Army’s defenses. General Frederick faced his first great challenge as a division commander: stopping the rampaging SS from rolling over the Thunderbirds, who held the critical center of the Allied line. With the Seventh Army fighting on three sides, and Eisenhower fearing it might soon be destroyed, all manner of reinforcements were rushed to help bolster the front, including French soldiers from General Leclerc’s 2nd French Armored Division and green troops from the U.S. 70th Division.
The Thunderbirds stood firm but not without significant loss. In Sparks’s regiment, fifty men were injured as they held off the German attacks. They included popular medic Joe Medina, who was wounded and knocked unconscious by shell fire and days after being hit woke in a hospital in France. Medina was possibly the last medic from the regiment to have known Sparks before the war. They had come a long way together, the soft-spoken Mexican-American shepherd’s son and the lieutenant colonel who had joined the “Eager for Duty” regiment at Fort Sill on February 6, 1941. Medina had since tended scores of badly wounded men under Sparks’s command, in every battle since Sicily, and had been treated by Sparks with real warmth, like a good friend, until this, his third serious wound, finally took him off the line for good.
IN THE HILLS north of Reipertswiller it was 8:30 A.M. when German shells began to explode and shards of hot steel flew in every direction. The rate of fire was so quick it sounded as if the 88mm guns were in fact machine pistols, the shrill whistles of shells becoming a constant scream, the crump and thud of explosions a steady drumming.
The Thunderbirds were striking back, pushing the German forces in Operation Northwind toward Germany. But the Nazis were in no mood to give up without a fight. At Reipertswiller and in many other villages and nameless mountain passes, Seventh Army units were meeting truly stunning resistance.
Even after the ordeal of Anzio, Sparks was surprised by the intensity of the German shelling. He knew that without massive counterfire and armored support his Third Battalion could not advance much farther. Later that morning of January 14, he set out to join the forward elements of his Third Battalion. He was with three other men: a translator, nineteen-year-old German-born Karl Mann, who had joined the regiment as a replacement at Anzio; a much-trusted driver, Albert Turk; and a runner, Carleton Johnson. Sparks and Turk were up front.
Karl Mann sat in the backseat beside Johnson. Mann had first seen combat as an ammunition carrier for a water-cooled .30-caliber machine gun in the battalion’s heavy-weapons company, before being asked by Sparks the previous November to become his interpreter. Despite Mann spending most days in Sparks’s company, the twenty-seven-year-old Third Battalion commander remained a distant, inscrutable figure to him. Colonel Sparks was not one for small talk or sharing his feelings and never mentioned his family back home, unlike some officers. With the often curt, no-nonsense “Shotgun” Sparks, it was all business all the time.
The jeep sped down a paved road. It had snowed the previous night, and two to three inches of fresh powder coated the ground. All of a sudden there was a loud explosion and Sparks was thrown into the air, several yards clear of the jeep. He was alive, though badly bruised and in shock. His left knee and right finger were cut. He lay sprawled in the snow, stunned, blood seeping from his wounds into the whiteness.
Mann was also in shock but otherwise unharmed. The sleeping bag he’d been sitting on had absorbed much of the blast. He climbed out of the jeep and saw that its back wheel was actually resting on top of a mine, an inch from the detonator. There were dozens of other mines laid out across the road in an extended W pattern, mostly hidden by the snow. One of the jeep’s front wheels had run over and detonated one of them.
No one but Sparks was hurt. While he was being tended to in an aid station, Captain John L. McGinnis, the Third Battalion’s executive officer, took over command of the Third Battalion as it began to push farther into the hills north of Reipertswiller. The German artillery fire was still so intense that Captain McGinnis himself was soon wounded and carried into the Third Battalion’s aid station, joining a fast-growing number of other men.
Sparks had little choice but to return to his post and resume command of his battalion. It had yet to reach its objectives, and his men would need him if they were to succeed. Back at the front line he gave orders to strike farther north into thickly wooded hills. By 3 P.M., his battalion’s three companies had managed to advance almost a mile despite the ferocious enemy fire.
As darkness approached, Sparks ordered a halt. It was 6:10 P.M. when he received an urgent message from regimental headquarters. Intelligence reports predicted an imminent SS counterattack involving at least three thousand troops. It was vital that Sparks’s battalion, numbering fewer than a thousand men, seize a ridge before the German offensive began. Early the following morning, Sparks ordered his battalion to attack once more. Around 9 A.M., it came under accurate fire from mortar and artillery and men were forced to take cover. By 1 P.M., K and L Companies had nonetheless reached the critical ridge, suffering fewer than a dozen casualties. Soon I Company also arrived and took up position between K and L Companies. Now the battalion ran in a line some eight hundred yards long, east to west, in the forested mountains north of Reipertswiller.
Sparks’s men had carried out his orders successfully. But the regiment’s other battalions had not managed to seize ridges on either side of Third Battalion’s, which meant that the Third Battalion was isolated, without support, its positions dangerously exposed. “We were the only God-damn battalion in the division who took our objective,” remembered Sparks. “We were sitting up there all on our own.”
That afternoon, Sparks walked up a trail through the dense forest, to the positions his men had taken. He found them well dug in. He told his company commanders they would need to be extra vigilant. He then returned to his forward command post near Reipertswiller, at the base of a supply trail, while it was still light. At 4:15 P.M., as darkness began to settle, he received an urgent radio report from Company K. Enemy troops were advancing and occupying a ridge to the left of the battalion. They then probed Sparks’s battalion’s positions but were pushed back by heavy machine-gun fire.
Later that evening, L Company detected another German probe and opened fire. The Germans quickly pulled back, leaving their dead behind. When several stiffening bodies were later examined, it was learned from pay-books that the Germans were from the 6th SS Nord Division. By now, the SS on the Western Front had a fearsome reputation for brutality and indiscriminate violence: A widely reported massacre of American POWs on December 17 at Malmédy, during the Ardennes offensive, had sent a chill through the entire U.S. Army in Europe and inflamed long-standing hatred for Hitler’s most fanatical warriors. Sparks’s men knew they could expect little mercy if they had to surrender.
Sparks ordered every able-bodied man who could wield an M1 onto the line to defend his battalion’s position, hoping reinforcements would arrive in time to repel another German strike.
THE TROOPS FROM the 11th SS Mountain Infantry Regiment crept forward. They then set up positions in the woods overlooking a trail and opened fire with mortars and machine guns on Thunderbirds who were advancing along it, quickly pushing them back. The SS now controlled the main supply route that led to the Third Battalion’s positions. Meanwhile other German units moved through the thick forest and effectively surrounded Sparks’s men, seizing high ground on all sides of the ridge.
Among the enemy troops was twenty-year-old Johann Voss. He was fighting the “Amis,” as the Germans called the Americans, for the first time and learning that they were just as tough and persistent as the Russians and Finns he had encountered in the North, and far better supported by artillery fire. Voss and his comrades were grimly determined experts in mountain fighting, having long since adapted their weapons and tactics to the terrain. Armed with Panzerfausts, they were crucially far more mobile than the Thunderbirds, having fitted machine guns and even Nebelwerfer rocket launchers to sleds. Voss and his fellow SS also had excellent artillery support; their morale was far higher than that of Sparks’s men; and they were determined to fight to the end to defend their homeland. The odds were in fact very much against the Americans.
At his forward command post, an increasingly concerned Sparks learned that the key supply trail to his men had been cut off. It had to be reopened or his entire battalion could be overrun. Swift and intense use of force was essential. Above all, Sparks was determined to avoid another tragedy like that at Anzio, when his men had been surrounded and then gradually wiped out over several days. The lesson of the Battle of the Caves had been to hold at all costs, but only if the stakes warranted the resulting sacrifice in young men’s lives. The current situation, as Sparks saw it, did not necessitate a prolonged, stubborn resistance. As soon as possible, his men should be pulled off the ridge, using the critical supply trail as an escape route.
Sparks consulted with regimental commander Colonel O’Brien, who shared his views. O’Brien contacted the Division G-3, in charge of operations, and asked permission to pull the Third Battalion from the ridge. The G-3 then conferred with the 45th’s commander, General Frederick, who saw the situation differently. Sparks’s men must remain in their positions. More lives would be lost and the Allied front would be under greater threat if the SS seized the ridge. Frederick’s orders were to “hold the line as long as possible to keep from creating weakness in the front.” Frederick wasn’t about to risk his reputation for steely aggression by giving up ground this late in the war.
The response to O’Brien’s request to pull the Third Battalion back was emphatic: “Permission denied.”
When Sparks learned of Frederick’s order, he was furious. It was sheer stupidity. Frederick was clearly way out of his depth, incapable of reading the battle correctly. Sparks was as incensed as he was alarmed by Frederick’s belligerence. From crackling radio messages, he knew his men were weak and getting weaker by the minute, running low on ammunition, their positions being methodically picked off by superb SS troops. This was no time to stand and hold as Americans had at Bastogne that Christmas when the outcome of a much greater battle was in the balance. If the SS wanted Reipertswiller so badly, let them have it.
IT WAS JUST after midnight when General Frederick’s second in command, Colonel Paul Adams, contacted Colonel O’Brien’s regimental headquarters. He wanted to know if any men had managed to open the vital supply trail and get through to Sparks’s stranded companies.
Major Carroll, the regimental S-3, did not know.
Adams was far from pleased.
What the hell was going on? What was the holdup?
“Will you find out why Third Battalion hasn’t tried to use light tanks to contact the companies before this?” Adams asked Carroll.
“They have tried to contact them before,” replied Carroll. “They were not successful. They ran into automatic fire and rifle grenades.”
The thirty-eight-year-old Alabama-born Adams, who had previously served as General Frederick’s executive officer, had been with the division for only a fortnight. Like so many senior officers in the American Army that January, he had been rapidly promoted and lacked critical combat experience.
Adams angrily demanded to know why Sparks had been “fooling around all evening.” Why hadn’t he been able to reach his men?
Carroll handed the telephone receiver to Colonel O’Brien. Adams vented his frustration at O’Brien, then added: “Tell Colonel Sparks to get the lead out of his ass and get up to the companies!”
It was a gross, inexcusable insult to one of his regiment’s finest officers. Clearly, Adams didn’t have a clue about Sparks or the severity of the fast-deteriorating situation on the ground. All he could see was lines on a map.
O’Brien managed to control his temper, but only just.
“You’d better watch your language and what you’re saying!” he told Adams. “Colonel Sparks is more courageous and eager to get the job done than anyone I know of!”
The conversation ended abruptly.
THIRD BATTALION’S POSITIONS, two hills with a saddle between them, were utterly devastated, dotted with hundreds of shell holes. German and American corpses littered the churned and bloodstained ground. The trees that had previously provided cover looked like so many snapped matchsticks. The surrounding ridges controlled by the SS were just as apocalyptic due to the unprecedented heavy fire of the 158th Artillery, which had landed an astonishing five thousand shells on the Germans the previous day.
Sparks was in constant communication with his battalion through a radio in his forward command post. Every urgent message compounded his frustration and concern. Casualties had mounted through the long night, bringing the total over three days to 118, a quarter of his battalion. The SS had dug in behind and to the front of them and had them completely pinned down. Whenever a Thunderbird showed his head aboveground, he was seemingly greeted by machine-gun fire, followed soon after by the hiss and scream of a Nebelwerfer rocket launcher. Observers lurked behind rocks and trees on the high ground around the battalion’s positions. The crosshairs of SS sniper rifles had settled on American foxholes all across the ridge.
To his relief, around 6 A.M. on January 18, a sleepless and ever more anguished Sparks got what he needed to attempt a breakthrough: Three M8 reconnaissance vehicles arrived at his command post. It was dark as he greeted the young officers of the armored vehicles. At first light, they would set out to reopen the supply trail to his stranded battalion.
Time was running out. The SS were, remembered one Thunderbird, “close to the kill and they knew it.” In the hills surrounding the battalion, they strapped on the twin fuel tanks of flamethrowers, shouldered MG42 machine guns, ammunition belts hanging around their necks, and picked up their recoilless grenade launchers called Panzerfausts. They then began to move through the forest from several directions toward the ridge held by Sparks’s men. Their primary target was Lieutenant Osterholt’s G Company, closest to the supply trail, now down to just sixty-eight men, many of them wounded.
Dawn was breaking as the two hundred SS troops, in winter camouflage, crept closer toward G Company, trailing small sleds on which MG42 machine guns had been mounted, ready to be fired. Then the SS crouched down and checked their machine pistols, flamethrowers, and “potato-masher” grenades, waiting for the order to attack. A few minutes later, there was a shrill blast of a whistle: the signal to attack. Soon the white-helmeted SS were on top of Lieutenant Osterholt’s G Company, tossing stick grenades into foxholes and dugouts and letting rip with machine pistols, which made a b-r-r-r-r-r-r-p sound due to their high rate of fire.
The sled-mounted MG42s raked G Company’s positions, firing fifteen hundred rounds a minute, green and white tracers ripping through the murky forest, ricocheting off rocks and shattering already smashed tree limbs. Snow, fragments of bark, and lethal splinters from tree bursts filled the air. Flares soared and cruelly lit the killing field below as the SS moved in on Sparks’s men, squirting jets of roaring yellow flame at the most stubborn defenders.
It was not just G Company that came under attack. The SS probed all across the Third Battalion’s positions. From every one of Sparks’s five stranded companies came radio calls of distress. Fewer than thirty men from G Company escaped the German infiltration. The other forty in the unit were either killed or captured. Those who somehow got clear of the jets of burning gasoline and hails of bullets staggered to K Company’s positions, fifty yards to the north on the benighted ridge.
In G Company’s seized positions, the SS searched for food and weapons. Among the abandoned equipment they found an SCR-300 radio. It was still working, much to the delight of the SS men’s commanding officer, Standartenführer Helmut Raithel, who had it brought to him in his command post. The quick-thinking Raithel sent for an English-speaking rifleman in another SS battalion. The soldier was in fact fluent, having lived in Chicago before the war. It wasn’t long before he was translating the curt messages he heard over the radio.
The SS now knew the Americans’ every move.
AT SPARKS’S FORWARD command post, the two-hundred-pound, dark green SCR-694 radio set delivered more bad news.
“G Company is captured! Something has to be done quick!”
The SS began to shell the battalion’s positions mercilessly. More shells landed in rapid succession on the Thunderbirds than anywhere else in the previous four hundred days of war, even at Anzio. Shards of white-hot steel seeded almost every yard of the Americans’ positions. “No aid could be given to the wounded,” recalled one Thunderbird. “When hit, men sank in their holes and tended their wounds as best they could.” An astonishing three out of four men were injured by the flying shrapnel.
When the barrage finally ended later that morning, the armored vehicles at Sparks’s command post set out, accompanied by three squads of infantrymen. It was miserable weather, even for January in northern Europe. There was a steady lashing rain that considerably reduced visibility as the rescue party moved toward the vital supply trail.
Twenty-two-year-old Sergeant Bernard Fleming and his rifle squad of twelve men moved cautiously through woods beside the trail. He heard intense small-arms fire close by. The other rifle squads in the rescue party were knocking out German machine guns overlooking the trail. Then silence. Fleming continued up the trail, believing his fellow Thunderbirds had successfully broken through the German cordon around the battalion.
He was mistaken. Waiting in ambush up ahead were more SS machine gunners, well dug in and concealed, their new MG42 guns fully loaded and positioned to lay down deadly fire on the supply trail as it crossed a small bridge. A few minutes later, as Fleming and his squad approached the bridge, the SS opened up with the machine guns. Several men fell in agony, badly wounded in their legs—the only parts of their bodies that had been visible to the SS from their holes below the tightly bunched firs.
Sergeant Bernard Fleming looked around for cover. He was close to a large hole in the ground caused by a fallen tree.
“Come on,” he shouted at his men. “Get over here.”
Fleming and his men jumped into the hole.
Not long after, two men from another squad appeared and jumped into the hole with Fleming and his men.
“We got orders to withdraw,” one of them said. “But I couldn’t get out. I heard you guys firing down here, so I came down.”
The SS opened fire again. Fleming and the others were pinned down. Indeed, the rescuers now needed saving. Their only hope was to get word back to Sparks’s command post.
A young radio operator, Private Emmett L. Neff volunteered: “I’ll go.”
Neff took off running through the woods, dodging trunks and branches, skirting the trail, headed for the American lines, but after twenty-five yards he fell in agony, shot through the ankles.
Neff shouted that he’d been hit.
“I’m going out there to get him,” said Fleming. “Give me a lot of fire.”
The men in the hole all did so. Fleming ran over to Neff, dragged him back to the hole, and began to pull off Neff’s bloodied boots so he could examine his wounds.
“I’m gonna go,” said Private Lawrence S. Mathiason.
“Wait a minute now,” said Fleming. “They already got one guy. They’re going to watch us.”
Mathiason ran off anyway. He hadn’t made it ten yards when the Germans “drilled” him with machine-gun and rifle fire.
Fleming took off his heavy ammunition belt and handed his tommy gun to one of his men. He didn’t need the extra weight.
“You guys stay here,” he said. “I’m going to get help.”
Fleming sprinted from the hole then dropped down beside Mathiason. He was dead. Fleming continued running. The SS had him in their sights. Bullets cracked overhead. One passed through his trousers but he wasn’t hit. He made it to the bottom of the trail, where he found Sparks in the Third Battalion’s forward command post.
Fleming told Sparks of the failed rescue mission. Now there were more men, stranded near the supply trail, who needed help.
Sparks could not stand to stay in his command post, listening to his men being killed, for a minute longer. He decided he would lead the next attempt to break through. He owed his men no less. But he wasn’t about to get himself killed in some crazy suicide mission. Armored cars clearly weren’t capable of punching through the German positions on the trail. Real firepower would be needed.
He picked up his field telephone and called regimental headquarters.
Major Carroll answered.
“[We] have to clear the hill,” said Sparks. “If you send tanks I will take [one] and fire at the positions myself.”
Sparks then put a call through to Lieutenant Curtis of K Company. They were fast running out of ammunition and in dire risk of being overrun, just as G Company had been earlier.
“Help on the way,” said Sparks.
To soften up German positions overlooking the supply trail, the 158th Artillery began to fire high-explosive shells. Soon, one was landing every six seconds—a truly astonishing rate of fire—in the steep draw through which the supply trail climbed. One SS machine gunner, in a position overlooking the trail, hunkered down, listening to the continuous bursting of shells, not daring to imagine how many of his friends were being killed.
Around 9 A.M., two Sherman tanks arrived at Sparks’s command post. He had little faith in the tanks’ ability to withstand a direct hit from a German 88mm shell. They were nicknamed “Ronson Lighters” because of their tendency when struck to “brew up” and explode with a giant jet of flame, just like their namesake, which the manufacturer boasted always “lights first time.” But they had powerful 76mm guns and their armor could stop machine-gun bullets and mortar fragments.
Sparks briefed their crews and then climbed into one of the eleven-foot-high vehicles. He did not close the hatch, knowing his view would be severely restricted if he did so. Instead, he stood up in the turret, put on a pair of headphones, and began to give orders to the driver and three other men, including a gunner and wireless operator. In doing so, he crossed a line—officers of his rank were not supposed to commandeer tanks, let alone lead their crews in combat.
Engines revved up. The tank crews went to work in their steel hulks, surrounded by levers and handles and set on top of ninety gallons of fuel, beside stores of high-explosive shells. Both tanks lurched forward, tracks grinding the ground, and headed up the supply trail.
Sparks hadn’t gone far when Colonel O’Brien contacted his command post.
“What is the score with Colonel Sparks?” asked O’Brien.
“He is taking a couple of medium tanks to try to clear out the draw again,” replied one of Sparks’s officers.
“Tell him to hold where he is. A battalion of the 179th [Infantry Regiment] is coming up to attack.”
Sparks was directing the lead tank, still standing in its turret, when the message from O’Brien was relayed to him. He ignored it and instead told the tank’s wireless operator to send a message to K Company.
“Help is fighting to get to you.”
O’Brien was still on the line back at the Third Battalion command post.
“Colonel Sparks says he will try to get up to his companies with the tanks,” said one of Sparks’s officers.
O’Brien chose to let Sparks continue. He could ill afford to lose his finest battalion commander, but he knew from experience that the young colonel could be infuriatingly stubborn when he set his mind to something. Given his men’s desperate situation, he would in all likelihood ignore a direct order to pull back, even if Eisenhower made it, and if anyone could get through, it would surely be Sparks. Under O’Brien’s command, he had never failed to take an objective.
The Sherman tanks trundled up the supply trail, the rubber treads and steel cleats of their tracks struggling for grip. Sparks dismounted a couple of times to reconnoiter ahead and then moved forward again in the lead tank. Suddenly there was the angry rip of a machine gun and a sharp pinging as MG42 bullets ricocheted off the lead tank. Sparks returned fire with the tank’s .30-caliber machine gun, squeezing off short bursts to avoid burning out its air-cooled barrel, sweeping the trees and rocks on either side of the trail, hoping to hit any men lurking with Panzerfausts.
He also barked instructions through his headset to the men operating his tank’s 76mm cannon. A loader tugged a shell from a bracket and closed the breech, then the gunner fired, the cannon’s violent recoil just inches from his face. The sound was like an immense, deafening bark. Because the 76mm fired at a very high velocity, it made far more noise than an artillery piece. With his clattering machine gun, which could cut trees in two, and the cannon, which could blow a log dugout to smithereens, Sparks managed to pin down the SS overlooking the trail. Several men from Bernard Fleming’s rescue party who were hiding along the trail were able to pull back to safer positions.
Sparks ordered the tanks forward again. The trail steepened and narrowed as it approached the bridge where Fleming and his men had earlier run into an ambush. The tanks’ engines were gunned. It was ever more difficult to gain traction. The drivers peered through narrow slits as they operated sluggish controls. The wireless radio blared. Sparks shouted orders. The turret trainer whirred and guns rattled.
It was a terrifying experience to be inside a Sherman tank during combat. Every man knew that at any second an enemy shell could hit. If lucky, he would see a bright red bruise to the tank’s metal that faded seconds after impact. Then he would have to clamber to the turret, scraping elbows on sharp edges, and get the hell out before the enemy had time to fire a second time. Just as often, the fuel and high-explosive shells would ignite and then flames would rip through the iron tomb, leaving men looking like little black dolls, two-foot-tall blocks of charcoal.
Sparks approached the bridge. Some fifty yards away, concealed on the hillside, was twenty-year-old SS veteran Johann Voss. He watched as Sparks closed on the bridge, still firing bursts from the tank’s machine gun. “If [he] could pass the bridge unharmed,” recalled Voss, “we only had a slim chance in a duel. Our bullets would only scratch their armor.”
The tracks on Sparks’s lead tank spun on the steep, icy ground and then lost traction. The tank slid sideways, exposing its right flank. A Panzerfaust sounded. There was a loud explosion as a shell hit Sparks’s tank at the base of the turret. The sound would have reverberated through the tank as if it were a drum. The impact knocked out the 76mm cannon. Sparks and the crew were unharmed. Crucially, the tank and the machine gun were still operable.
Sparks stood in the turret and looked around.
Several Thunderbirds lay bleeding on the ground beside the supply trail.
One man cowered behind trees.
“Can I come out?” he shouted.
“Make a break for it,” shouted Sparks.
The soldier had gone only a few yards when Sparks heard the rattle of a machine gun. Another of his men had been mercilessly gunned down. It was as if something snapped deep inside him. Days of excruciating tension and frustration and very little sleep had pushed him beyond his breaking point. He looked around at his wounded men. Not for a second longer would he stand by as they slowly bled to death. He had lost his entire company at Anzio. He would rather die than lose all his men again. All that mattered was doing something to save some of them.
Sparks climbed out of the tank’s hatch and jumped to the ground.
SS corporal Johann Voss stood beside a machine gunner in his squad, watching Sparks through field glasses.
The gunner had his finger on his trigger.
Voss saw Sparks move toward his injured men.
“Wait a minute,” said Voss. “Let’s see what happens.”
Voss and his fellow SS held their fire.
Sparks ran to the man farthest from him, some fifty yards away. The man had been shot through the chest. He was a heavy kid and Sparks was not strong enough to carry him on his back. So he dragged him across the icy ground. Still, the SS stood and watched. There was no honor to be gained, recalled Voss, by drilling a brave officer with 7.92mm bullets as he tried to help his wounded men. Indeed, there was a silent understanding among the SS watching Sparks. Killing him would be wrong.
Sparks lifted the heavy kid onto the tank. Two other wounded men were not far away. He got to them and helped them onto the tank too. Incredibly, the SS still held their fire.
Voss could still see Sparks clearly through his field glasses. Never had he witnessed such an act of courage by the enemy. There was no way he was going to open fire on the wounded lying on the tank. He watched as Sparks got back into the lead tank. The rescue had lasted no more than eight minutes.
Sparks ordered both tanks to return to American lines. It was impossible to continue up the trail. The tanks’ treads were worthless on the steep ice. He did his best to make the injured comfortable, tending to their wounds as the tanks backed down the trail. One had a broken leg, and he was able to make a splint, securing it with an ammunition belt.
Voss and his nearest comrades held their fire, but others several hundred yards down the trail, who had not witnessed the rescue, did not. There was a hollow sound—the tonk of a mortar being fired. Then the SS opened up with what seemed like everything they had. Bullets pinged and ricocheted off the metal of Commander Joseph Crowley’s number two tank, which followed behind Sparks’s, shredding most of the material attached to it. But neither tank was knocked out. They both continued down the supply trail as fast as possible.
It was 1:30 P.M. when an utterly drained Sparks arrived back at his forward command post. The front of his tank was charred black and part of the cannon had broken loose. The machine gun was almost burned-out. Sparks had fired an incredible five thousand rounds.
Word of the attempted breakthrough spread fast. Sergeant Bernard Fleming, whose wounded squad members had been rescued, later remembered that Sparks’s actions “buoyed the morale of all who were aware of his gallantry that day. Our commander had proved once again that he valued his soldiers’ lives and was willing to take large risks on their behalf.”
Sparks couldn’t have cared less what the men he had rescued thought. He had not been able to break through. What was left of his battalion was still stranded, being picked off by fanatical Nazis. He had not reached his men on the ridge. He had not saved any of them.
He had failed. Yet he had survived.
He had not cared if he got killed. In fact, he had expected to die when he got out of the tank.
Why hadn’t the SS riddled him with bullets?