FIGHTING THROUGH TO HAMMELBURG
At 4:15 on the morning of Tuesday, March 27, four hours after Task Force Baum broke out of Schweinheim, Hauptmann Walter Eggemann was awakened by a telephone call at Nazi Party district headquarters at Würzburg, a pretty city on the River Main thirty-five miles south of Hammelburg. The thirty-three-year-old captain was the holder of the Ritterkreuz, the Knight’s Cross, one of Germany’s highest bravery awards, earned in 1943 on the Russian front when he was a junior infantry officer with a grenadier regiment. Now Eggemann had a very different role.
Ever since the July 1944 attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life, the SS had assumed increasing power in the Reich, giving Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler control over military affairs that had previously been the sole domain of the army, navy and air force. Hauptmann Eggemann, now attached to the Waffen-SS, had been appointed Himmler’s special representative in three military districts. Although only a captain, Eggemann’s special appointment gave him the power to overrule generals and to have senior officers removed from their posts and shot for failing to do their duty to the Führer.
This was why Oberleutnant Trenk, who’d been sleeping at the Rathaus, or town hall, at Lohr, on the River Main between Würzburg and Aschaffenburg, had telephoned Eggemann before he contacted anyone else. Lohr town hall was being inundated with calls from villages to the southeast saying that an American armored column was moving rapidly along Reichsstrasse 26 toward the city from Schweinheim. At this point, Eggemann had no idea that this column was heading for Hammelburg. However, knowing that the German army operated a military training area, the Lager Hammelburg, outside that town, he instructed Trenk to advise the senior officer there of the approach of the American column. Trenk subsequently called Oberst Richard Hoppe, commander of the Lager Hammelburg, to pass on the information. Hoppe had a tank alert issued to all units in the vicinity, then went back to bed.
Hauptmann Eggemann was considerably more active than the training area colonel. He rang the Wehrmacht’s 7th Army HQ at the nearby town of Heigenbrücken, seeking and receiving approval to immediately take command of all forces in the Hammelburg area to resist any American push in the direction of the town. Eggemann then dressed and prepared to monitor the progress of the American column. Captain Eggemann’s involvement would prove to have a major influence on the fates of both Task Force Baum and the Schubin boys at Hammelburg.
* * *
FOR ABE BAUM, everything was taking way too long. After the delay at Schweinheim, Task Force Baum had found Highway 26 and pushed northeast. Speeding along the tree-lined roadway, they’d fired on a German military camp they passed just as its recruits were forming up for dawn parade. Soon afterward, two contingents of German troops on the road had capitulated to the task force with raised hands. This had slowed things down some more as surrendered weapons were mashed beneath tank tracks. The disarmed Germans were told to wait for the next Americans to come along.
In failing to reach Hammelburg before dawn, the task force had lost the element of surprise. And it still had a long way to go, giving the Germans plenty of time to organize resistance in the Americans’ path. This all worried the hell out of the young task force commander, and he now put five Shermans at the head of the column to sweep aside opposition.
Just outside Lohr, the task force came upon a roadblock of an overturned truck and telegraph poles. As the lead tanks slowed, a Panzerfaust projectile rocketed from the roadblock with a whoomp and blasted the first Sherman. With its driver dead, the American tank slewed to the right and stopped. Surviving crew members scrambled out of hatches. The second tank pushed the roadblock aside, and fleeing Germans were sprayed with machine-gun fire. After the disabled Sherman had been blown up with grenades, the column moved on.
Rounding a bend, the lead tanks ran into several trucks hauling flak guns, coming from the opposite direction. As the German trucks were raked with tank fire, they stopped dead. Their Luftwaffe flak crews were slaughtered where they sat. As the armored column passed the smoking trucks, the Americans in the task force saw, with varying emotions, that the dead flak crew members were all women.
Bypassing Lohr a half mile to the city’s north, the column hurried on, its guns wrecking two trains steaming along on rail lines parallel to Highway 26. The highway also ran along the western side of the River Main. Barges and their tugboats moving leisurely along the river were sprayed with accurate tank fire. To modern eyes, it seems that this was all playing out like a video game. But the game was soon to become deadly for Baum’s men.
For speed, the M3s were back in the lead as the column approached the city of Gemünden, up the Main from Würzburg. Baum had all his tanks shell Gemünden’s extensive railroad marshalling yards where eight trains were lined up, then sent his first radio message back to Colonel Cohen, reporting their progress and calling for an airstrike on the crowded marshalling yards.
The marshalling yards had in fact been bombed late the previous afternoon. That air raid had found a unit of German tank destroyers sitting on flat cars in the yards. Panzerjägerkompanie 251, known as Danube 1, had been on its way from Linz in Austria to reinforce German forces outside Aschaffenburg. Danube 1’s commander, Hauptmann Heinrich Koehl, had sheltered with his crews in the town during the air raid.
Koehl’s tank destroyers, sixteen-ton Jagdpanzer 38 Hetzers, armed with 75 mm guns just like Abe Baum’s Shermans, had been delivered to the unit the previous month brand new from the Škoda factory in Czechoslovakia. They were so new that there hadn’t been time to give them the usual camouflage paint job. Their stark gunmetal gray hulls were simply emblazoned with German crosses. All nine fighting Hetzers and a Bergepanzer 38 recovery version of the Hetzer had escaped the American air raid unscathed. In the early evening, Koehl had followed orders to remove his Hetzers from their train and conceal them in trees on the slopes of the Zollberg, north of the River Saale, for the night.1
Three rivers, the Main, the Saale, and the Sinn, join at Gemünden. While Task Force Baum was now north of the Main, to follow Highway 26 north it still had to go through the city and use its road bridge to cross the Saale. As the column reached Gemünden, Baum sent his recon platoon under Lieutenant Norm Hoffner ahead into the downtown area. Hoffner reported back that the streets were deserted. Alerted to approaching American tanks, the terrified citizens of Gemünden were hiding in their cellars. Hoffner found antitank mines lying on the roadside at the Saale bridge, which apparently had been abandoned by defenders.
A company of Wehrmacht engineers from Regensburg had reached Gemünden not long before the Americans with orders to blow up the bridge and mine the approaches. Interrupted in their work by the arrival of Task Force Baum, the German engineers had taken up defensive positions on both sides of the river. The American recon platoon tossed the mines aside, detonating several, before coming under machine-gun fire from two houses on the far side of the Saale. On learning this, Baum decided to send the light tanks forward, supported by infantry, to take the bridge.
As the M3s pushed right up to the bridge, German fire increased. The rattle of machine guns from the other side of the river was joined by the crump of an antitank gun firing from ruins on a hill across the water and the whoomp of unseen Panzerfausts closer by. Five yards from the bridge, the leading light tank took a direct hit, shuddered and came to a halt before bursting into flames. Crewmen, some badly burned, bailed out.
With the tank blocking the way, the cigar-chomping Lieutenant Bill Nutto, riding in the second M3, jumped down and ran to it, just as Captain Baum arrived on the scene in his jeep. When the lieutenant yelled at the sergeant commanding the lead tank to get his disabled M3 out of the way, the traumatized NCO looked at Nutto, eyes wide.
“I’m quitting! I’m quitting!” bawled the sergeant. Then, seeing Captain Baum running up, he bolted for the rear.2
Just as Baum joined Nutto, both saw a Panzerfaust projectile wobbling through the air toward them. They would owe their lives to the fact that the Panzerfaust’s effective range was seventy yards. Fired from some distance away, this projectile dipped as it ran out of propulsion and plowed into the roadway only feet from the pair. But it detonated just the same. The blast threw Nutto to the ground, peppering his body with shrapnel. Looking around, Nutto saw Baum beside him, on his knees, his face white.
When Baum pulled himself to his feet, Nutto saw that the captain had been wounded in the right knee and right hand. Having two of the task force’s senior officers wounded so early into the mission was far from auspicious. As a medic helped Nutto back to a halftrack, Baum’s radio operator bandaged Baum’s pain-wracked knee. Looking past the burning lead tank, Baum saw Infantry Lieutenant Elmer Sutton dash across the bridge and reach the river’s far side. Two GIs were running across the bridge in the wake of their platoon leader. Another two were about to take off. At that moment there was a loud boom. The German engineers had had time to plant an explosive charge beneath a bridge span, and now they set it off, right under the pair of running Americans.
A plume of smoke, fire and shattered stone and concrete rose into the air. No trace of the two running GIs would ever be found. Sutton, cut off on the far side of the river, would fall into German hands. As the debris settled, Baum cursed. The bridge had been severed. The way was blocked. Hobbling back to his jeep, Baum radioed the column: “Back ’em up!”3
As the American vehicles reversed away from the bridge, Baum was joined by Major Stiller. Together they studied a map. With his bloodied right hand, Baum tapped the map. They would leave Highway 26 and head north, looking for a crossing of the River Sinn to bypass Gemünden. Sending Sergeant Wise in a jeep to find a road north, Baum ordered the column to turn around. He then radioed Colonel Cohen to tell him that he’d lost two tanks and that eighteen of his officers and men had been killed, captured or wounded. But, he added, he was still proceeding with the mission.
Around 9:00 a.m., as the American column headed away, a master sergeant from the German engineer unit, Oberfeldwebel Eugen Zoller, emerged from cover at the Saale bridge and clambered up and into the wrecked M3 to see if he could salvage anything useful. Zoller emerged triumphantly waving an American map left behind by the tank’s commander. The sergeant hurried with it to his company commander. The officer was equally delighted: on the map was clearly marked the route of Task Force Baum—from Aschaffenburg to Hammelburg. The officer promptly advised his superiors.
Now that the Germans knew where Abe Baum and his men were headed, orders went out to all available units in the Hammelburg area to report to Oberst Hoppe at his Lager Hammelburg HQ, located 300 yards north of the POW camps. Word was also relayed to the mayor of Hammelburg, Karl Clement. A fanatical Nazi and the town’s mayor since 1936, Clement immediately broadcast an alert to the people of Hammelburg via the public address speakers set throughout the town, urging them to evacuate at once.
At 10:00, 1,300 men from three companies of the Wehrmacht’s 113th Grenadier Regiment were sitting idly in carriages at the Waigolshausen railroad station, waiting for a locomotive, when orders came through to their most senior officer, a mere first lieutenant, Oberleutnant Demmel, to commandeer road transport and head at once for Hammelburg to support the Hetzers of Danube 1. From now on, this infantry detachment would bear the code name Kampfgruppe Demmel.
At the same time, Hauptmann Franz Gehrig, of Officer Candidate School 17 at Camp Grafenwöhr in eastern Bavaria, was ordered to immediately take his officer cadets to Hammelburg to join the defense. Gehrig promptly armed his one hundred cadets and loaded them into four gray MAN buses powered by ungainly but practical wood gas burners attached to the buses’ rear ends. Most of the cadets were NCOs with a year or so of combat experience. The buses set off for Hammelburg via Würzburg.
Thirty minutes later, the tank destroyers of Danube 1 arrived at Hammelburg on a freight train that they’d boarded at Gemünden north of the destroyed Saale bridge. The Hetzers’ engines were already running when the train pulled into Hammelburg’s station in the western part of the town. Hauptmann Koehl’s ten armored vehicles were unloaded from the freight wagons in record time, after which they assembled in a clay pit not far from the station. As Koehl waited at the clay pit, a small Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft, a Fieseler Storch, or Stork, flew over.
The Stork had been shadowing Task Force Baum. The Americans had known it was there, opening up with machine-gun and small-arms fire at one point, but the pilot had kept out of range, persistently sticking with the Americans like an annoying mosquito. Circling the clay pit now, the Luftwaffe pilot dropped a note to the tank destroyers, giving the latest position and direction of the American armored column.
Armed with this information, Hauptmann Koehl gave orders for the Hetzers to move out. They proceeded southwest along the north-south highway, Reichsstrasse 27, via Obereschenbach. Short of an intersection where a rough side road jagged off toward the Lager Hammelburg, Koehl halted his Hetzers and lined them up behind a small rise to intercept the approaching American tanks. Believing that a small bridge due west was too weak for heavy vehicles, Koehl expected the American column to approach along the road from the south. As several of Koehl’s men patched a field telephone into the local phone line, his gun crews loaded their guns. Now the Hetzers waited for the Americans to come to them.
At 11:00 that morning, as the last of the civilians who had been streaming from the town for the past two hours departed, turning Hammelburg into a virtual ghost town, another train rolled into the station. This one unloaded trainee signalers from a company of the 10th Signal Training and Replacement Battalion led by a Hauptmann Kammerle. Oberst Hoppe ordered Kammerle to combine his signalers with the Volkssturm home guard led by local Volkssturm leader Josef Merkle to defend the town and its POW camps.
With most of the town’s defenders being trainee signalers and home guard, there was little apart from the Hetzers to prevent the American task force from reaching Hammelburg. The odds were still in Abe Baum’s favor.
* * *
FOLLOWING BACK ROADS north, Task Force Baum had a stroke of bad luck and several strokes of good luck. The lead Sherman threw a track and had to be destroyed. Its crew joined Baum’s infantry. The column then ran into a German paratroop sergeant on a motorcycle who said he was on his way to Hammelburg for a wedding. The Americans suspected that he was a deserter. Under threat of death, the sergeant became the column’s guide. Next, a German staff car blundered into the column’s path. One of the occupants, the taciturn General Oriel Lotz, was taken prisoner and tied to the hood of a task force halftrack. Looking for a crossing as it followed the winding Sinn River, the column continued north.
With the German paratroop sergeant’s guidance, the task force found a small bridge at the hamlet of Burgsinn. Wehrmacht engineers had been ordered to blow up all bridges in the path of the American column, but thinking the Burgsinn bridge too small and too frail to support armored vehicles, they had not bothered with it. Slowly, warily, Task Force Baum successfully crossed the bridge. The column then pressed on southeast for Hammelburg along narrow, winding roads.
In the hilly, forested countryside east of Burgsinn, the column ran into a work detail of Russian POWs whose German guards ran off. General Lotz was handed over to the Russians, and the column continued. There was much speculation among the task force’s men as to what the Russians would do to the German general. Only much later would the Americans learn that, after they moved on, the resolute General Lotz had regrouped the German guards and regained control of the Russian POWs.
* * *
TO THE SOUTH, at Würzburg, Hauptmann Eggemann had established a temporary HQ at the Galgenberg Barracks, from where he’d been keeping himself apprised of the progress of the American armored column and the disposition of German forces being rallied to counter it. His latest information had the Americans approaching Burgsinn. Assuming the bridge there had been blown up, he felt sure the Americans must be trapped on the western side of the Sinn. He also knew that Danube 1 had arrived in Hammelburg.
Around 1:00 that afternoon, Eggemann placed a call to Hauptmann Koehl, the tank destroyers’ commander. Eggemann instructed Koehl to immediately deploy his Hetzers to Burgsinn to intercept the Americans.
Koehl flatly refused to move. “I am only answerable to 7th Army,” he responded before hanging up. A priest before the war, Koehl knew all about the hierarchy of command. With no orders from either 7th Army HQ or Oberst Hoppe, Koehl wasn’t going anywhere. He kept the Hetzers where they were.4
A furious Eggemann subsequently called Generalmajor Christoph von Gersdorff at 7th Army HQ, and requested, in the strongest possible terms, that Koehl’s Hetzers and the in-transit men of Kampfgruppe Demmel be immediately placed under his direct command. General von Gersdorff said he’d get back to him. He didn’t. Eggemann was left seething. So, when, an hour later, Hauptmann Gehrig’s four gray MAN buses pulled into the Galgenberg Barracks to resupply en route to Hammelburg, Eggemann promptly gave the training school captain new orders.
“Gehrig, you will proceed to Burgsinn, via Gemünden,” he commanded, “and destroy the American column.”5
Gehrig, a short man with chubby cheeks and an easy smile, was impressed by the courtly captain with the Knight’s Cross dangling from his neck. He was also much more politically aware than Danube 1’s Hauptmann Koehl: Gehrig was not going to disobey an order from Reichsführer Himmler’s personal representative. He and his cadets quickly restocked their buses with wood fuel, reboarded, and, now dubbed Kampfgruppe Gehrig, set off to obey Eggemann’s instructions.
Twenty minutes later, in Hammelburg, Oberst Hoppe received a telephone call from a Hauptmann Rose, a captain with the Lager’s railroad engineering school. On his own initiative, Rose had taken a few of his students southwest from Hammelburg to the Reussenberg, the highest hill in the district, shown as Hill 427 on American maps. Atop the hill stood the weathered stone ruins of a castle destroyed by the Swabian League in 1523 and never rebuilt. High in a tower amid those ruins, Rose had established an observation post, linking it to the local telephone system via field telephone. With his binoculars, Rose was scanning the landscape to the west.
“Twelve enemy tanks on the road from Aschenroth,” Rose reported to Hoppe. “Heading toward Obereschenbach.”6
Oberst Hoppe passed on the news to POW camp commander Generalmajor Günther von Goeckel at Oflag XIII-B that American armor was rapidly closing on Hammelburg.
Only the Hetzers of Danube 1 would now stand between Task Force Baum and the POW camps at Hammelburg—if Hauptmann Koehl had made the right decision about where to ambush the approaching task force.