The Last Battle (27 page)

Black soldiers of Company D, 17th Armored Infantry Battalion, clear German civilians from a recently captured town. Though most secondhand accounts of the Schloss Itter action state that Jack Lee tapped several Company D troops to take part in the rescue mission, the author’s research has shown that the four U.S. infantrymen who rode aboard Lee’s tank and helped defend the castle were actually drawn from the all-white 2nd Platoon, Company E, 2nd Battalion, 142nd Infantry Regiment.
(U.S. Army photo courtesy Steven Zaloga)

Soldiers of the crack 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division “Götz von Berlichingen” take a break from the intense hedgerow fighting that followed the June 1944 Allied landing in Normandy. Less than a year later elements of the Waffen-SS unit would besiege Schloss Itter.
(National Archives)

A career soldier three times decorated for bravery in combat against his nation’s enemies, Wehrmacht Major Josef “Sepp” Gangl willingly chose to put his life in even more direct peril in order to help Jack Lee save a querulous group of French VIPs locked away in a fairytale Austrian castle.
(National Archives)

For most of his military career the personification of the dedicated Waffen-SS officer, Hauptsturmführer Kurt-Siegfried Schrader nonetheless threw in his lot with Lee, Gangl, and Schloss Itter’s French prisoners.
(National Archives courtesy John Moore)

Maj. John T. Kramers (seen here in a postwar photo), a German-speaking former artilleryman assigned to the 103rd Infantry Division’s military-government section, was unaware of Jack Lee’s rescue force and launched his own effort to secure the French VIPs at Schloss Itter.
(Photo courtesy John T. Kramers)

A Seventh Army military policeman chats with (from left), Léon Jouhaux, François de La Rocque, Jean Borotra, and Marcel Granger following their rescue.
(National Archives)

Major General Anthony C. McAuliffe, commander of the 103rd Infantry Division, poses for a photo at his Innsbruck headquarters with former Schloss Itter honor prisoners (from left) Paul Reynaud, Marie-Renée-Joséphine Weygand, Maurice Gamelin, Édouard Daladier, and Maxime Weygand.
(National Archives)

Though Jack Lee is smiling in this 1947 photo taken outside Hand’s Inn in Norwich, NY, where he found employment after his plans for a profootball career fell through, his life went into a slow but seemingly inexorable downward spiral after World War II. The hero of “The Last Battle” died on Jan. 15, 1973, at the age of 54.
(Photo courtesy James I. Dunne)

CHAPTER 7

A CASTLE BESIEGED

J
UST AFTER FOUR AM
Jack Lee was jolted awake by the sudden banging of M1 Garands, the sharper crack of Kar-98s, and the mechanical chatter of a .30-caliber spitting out rounds in short, controlled bursts. Knowing instinctively that the rising crescendo of outgoing fire was coming from the gatehouse, Lee rolled off the bed, grabbed his helmet and M3, and ran from the room.

The young tanker raced down the hallway, across the Great Hall, and out the front door. As he reached the arched schlosshof gate leading from the terrace to the front courtyard, an MG-42 machine gun opened up from somewhere along the parallel ridgeline east of the castle, the weapon’s characteristic ripping sound
¹
clearly audible above the outgoing fire and its tracers looking like an unbroken red stream as they arced across the ravine and ricocheted off the castle’s lower walls. Almost immediately the German weapon was answered by the slower, deeper thumping of
Besotten Jenny
’s .50-caliber Browning, and, as Lee ran the last few feet to the gatehouse, he could see the M2’s own tracers stabbing into the trees near where the MG-42 must be. The German weapon quickly fell silent, its two-man crew no doubt seeking shelter from the .50-cal.’s deadly stream of thumb-sized rounds.

The big Browning continued to bang away as Lee reached the inner set of gates and yanked open the small wooden door leading to the guard
tower on the west side of the gatehouse. Using his red-lensed flashlight
²
for illumination, he pounded up a flight of circular stone stairs until he reached the first firing loop, through which Sutton was methodically loosing rounds from his M1. To Lee’s surprise the infantryman was firing not across the ravine but down into it, aiming into the darkness to the west of the tower. In response to Lee’s shouted query, Sutton said that he’d spotted four troops who had apparently cut through the concertina wire—Waffen-SS he thought, though with only moonlight for illumination it was hard to be sure—dashing the thirty or forty feet upslope to the base of the foundation wall. They looked to be carrying grappling hooks and ropes but were spotted before they could put them to use. When he opened up on the enemy troops, Sutton said, they had scurried back downslope under covering fire from the woods and gone to ground.

Telling Sutton to save his ammo until he had a definite target, Lee continued up the circular stairway to the small door leading into the gatehouse’s cramped upper level. Inside he found Worsham and McHaley lying prone behind the now-quiet .30-caliber, surrounded by spent brass and wreathed by floating dust kicked up by the machine gun’s firing. As McHaley fed another belt of ammo into the weapon, he told Lee that when Sutton had started shooting at the interlopers, the west side of the gatehouse had almost immediately come under rifle and machine-pistol fire from troops hidden on the upper floor of the small inn on the schlossweg. He and Worsham had laid down suppressing fire, aiming at muzzle flashes and the occasional shadowy figure they could see silhouetted in the building’s windows. Despite their somewhat exposed position, they themselves hadn’t been directly targeted, and when the MG-42 had opened up, it seemed to be aimed at Sutton’s position, not at them. When
Besotten Jenny
’s .50-caliber had gotten into the act, McHaley said, the enemy fire had briefly shifted toward the tank but then died out completely.