War Stories III (15 page)

34th Infantry Division
Faid Pass, Tunisia
18 February 1943

I started my training in March 1941, but we didn't even get rifles until May. Later I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for some real training and from there, I was sent overseas on a British passenger liner that had been converted into a troop ship—along with about 1,700 other troops that were just as green as I was. We landed in Liverpool and started doing amphibious training, getting ready for an invasion—though nobody told us where. We assumed it would be some place in Europe. By July we were training for landings on beaches that were laid out exactly like the ones we'd see in North Africa on Operation Torch—but we didn't find that out until later.

In October the word came down, “We are going to take a boat trip.” Everyone in my BAR squad—all three Browning Automatic Rifle teams—knew then that we were headed for war. I think they told us we were going to North Africa three or four days before we actually landed. Our objective was to take the western part of the city of Algiers.

After we landed on 8 November, we marched twenty-plus miles before we were under fire by a Vichy French battalion. The actual battle, as far as we were concerned, was over in about two and a half hours.

Things were quiet for a few days but then, about the third night, while we were in Algiers, the Luftwaffe started bombing us. Every night thereafter the Germans would spend three, maybe four hours, bombing the ships and piers at the harbor and our camps around the city. They had plenty of aircraft—but we had almost none. Almost every night German Stukas would attack 17th Field Artillery. It was like that until we headed east from Algiers in December to attack the German lines near the Faid pass, up in the Atlas Mountains of Tunisia.

For most of December, January, and the first half of February of '43, we were in a series of back and forth fights with Rommel's forces up in the mountains. Our regiment was spread between the Faid Pass and Kasserine Pass—a distance of about fifty miles. Then, on the night of 13–14 of February, the Luftwaffe carpet-bombed our whole sector. Afterwards we could hear armor moving and we very quickly realized this was no probe—it was a major attack.

One of our officers passed the word that we were surrounded and had to try to break out—and would have to make a forced march to get to the Kasserine Pass. But, of course, you don't move at night, on foot, as fast as you do in the daytime.

By the night of the seventeenth we had been battling the Germans nonstop for three days as we retreated. We had no food, very little water, and were running low on ammunition. Our biggest holdup was trying to move an entire unit of 1,800 troops through enemy lines. So we were told to break up into small groups and start walking northwest toward Kasserine as soon as it was dark.

Just before dark, a column of American tanks headed toward us. They were probably four miles away and I watched 'em, through my field glasses. Even though they were outnumbered, they engaged the Germans—but there just wasn't anything they could do. The Panzers just devastated them. There were also some armored personnel carriers with 105s mounted on 'em that fired on the German tanks but the shells just bounced off—they couldn't penetrate the Panzer's armor plate.

There were probably twenty men in the group I was with and we started out after dark. There was no moon that night and we had to move very slowly because there were minefields all over the place.

During the night we passed through some German tank platoons that were held up on the road—but I estimated that we were still twenty miles behind the German front line. Before dawn, the dozen of us who were still together stumbled into an irrigation ditch and we decided to hole up there during the daylight hours and hope that we wouldn't be spotted.

But shortly after the sun came up, a German half-track with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on it came rumbling up through the ditch. A German officer, probably twenty-four or twenty-five years old, said in perfect English, “Gentlemen, for you, the war is over. You can go and see our homeland now.”

Fifteen German soldiers circled around us, took our weapons, and made us understand that we were to start marching east. After five or six hours we arrived at a barbed-wire fenced compound, and the English-speaking officer said, “You'll stay here, for a couple of days.”

Eventually they sent us to a prisoner of war camp, in Germany, that held POWs of every nationality—including about 1,500 American soldiers. They were brutal to the Americans, but for the Russians it was worse. Once, they brought in a whole trainload of Russian POWs, but never let 'em off that train—for forty-two days! By the time they opened the doors of the boxcars, half of them were already dead, and the other half probably wished they had died.

A couple of American POWs hung themselves—committed suicide. But a lot more died from what the Nazi guards said were “heart attacks.” I was confined in that POW camp until we were liberated—on May 6, 1945—just two days before the war ended.