Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II. James Holland

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СКАЧАТЬ into a pile of rubble. Tom received a second Bronze Star – an oak leaf cluster – for his bravery under fire at Verlautenheide.

      The fighting around Aachen lasted for the best part of a month, but later, after it had finally fallen, Tom and a friend took a jeep into the city where they came across a former German barracks and stopped to have a look around. The place was a mess – papers, clothing and furniture strewn everywhere. But Tom noticed a box on the top of a locker and reaching up, took it down. Inside was a very large Nazi swastika flag. He has it still to this day.

      After Aachen, the First Division were sent south into the Hürtgen Forest, and there, with winter closing in, they suffered a brutal month. The forest was dense, full of mountains and hidden ravines, ideal country to defend, but nightmarish terrain through which to try and attack. During November, eight US divisions had tried to break through the Hürtgen Forest. ‘All,’ noted the First Division history, ‘had emerged mauled, reduced, and in low spirits.’ Casualties amongst the 18th had been as high as at any time during the war – a thousand dead and wounded. But what Tom particularly remembers is the near constant rain and the terrible, ghostly darkness. ‘I never saw such a dark place,’ he says. ‘If you went twenty yards from your foxhole, you’d get lost.’ The forest, he noticed, played tricks. One night, he was on guard duty and it was raining heavily. Near a road, he thought he could hear troops marching past. But he couldn’t see a thing, so he stepped towards the road and held out his arm to see if it would touch somebody’s raincoat as they marched past. He felt nothing. ‘It sounded as real as could be – tramp, tramp, tramp.’ But it was just the sound of the rain on the pine trees.

      At the end of November, the depleted 18th were pulled out of the line and sent to a town in Belgium for a week’s R&R. It was their first proper rest since D-Day. They’d only been there a few days when someone came up to Tom and said, ‘Guess who I’ve just seen back at the depot?’ Tom didn’t have to guess – he knew who it was already.

      After nearly six months in England, Dee was back. He could have been given a posting back home, but he was not having any of that. He wanted to be with his brother; and in any case, the 18th was home. Tom had mixed feelings about seeing Dee, however. On the one hand, he was thrilled to see him again – and looking so well – but on the other, he worried about him being back at the front. The experience of Aachen and the Hürtgen Forest had shown that there would be no easy victory. At least, though, they had this period of rest ahead of them, and with the shortening days and weather becoming even colder, it looked as though the front might stabilize for the winter.

      And then a strange thing happened. They were talking in Tom’s room in the house where he was billeted and Dee had just handed over a bottle of Scotch that he’d brought back from England for his brother, when someone shouted, ‘Fire!’

      ‘And the building was on fire,’ says Dee – just an accident, it later turned out. ‘So we grabbed our rifles and every doggone thing else and got out of there.’ From the road outside, they watched the fire spread, then suddenly the window in Tom’s room blew out. ‘There goes that Scotch,’ Dee told Tom ruefully.

      It was on 16 December that the Germans launched their last big offensive of the war, and it took the Western Allies by complete surprise. Under the cover of low cloud and misty, overcast conditions – the ‘season of night, fog and snow’ – the Germans had managed to gather, undetected, thirty-six divisions for a massed drive through Belgium to Antwerp, a thrust designed to split the Allied forces in two and sever their supply lines.

      The 18th Infantry were still on R&R when, the following day, the news of the German attack reached them. Their leave was over: by three that afternoon, they were packed into trucks and were beginning to hurry to the front. The 2nd Battalion found itself holding a position south of the town of Bütgenbach, on what was soon to become the northernmost limit of the Ardennes salient – or ‘bulge’. By Christmas Eve, the German attack had run out of steam, crippled by lack of fuel, but what followed was two months of appalling attritional, warfare. In the Ardennes, the war soon began to resemble the worst horrors of the Western Front over twenty years before.

      On Christmas Day, the big freeze started, and then came the snow, covering everything in a deep white shroud. The temperatures dropped below freezing and stayed there, and the Americans, with too much cotton clothing and not enough wool, began to suffer badly as they crouched in their foxholes and listened to the shells screaming overhead.

      There’s another photograph of Tom and Dee, taken around this time. There’s still an air of swagger about them, but they look more serious, older even, although this may have something to do with the Errol Flynn moustaches they’re both sporting. Standing ankle-deep in snow, they’re wearing thick scarves around their necks and white camouflage covers over their tin hats. ‘The worst part of the Bulge was the snow and my clothes being froze,’ says Dee. ‘Course, we had thick pants over our other clothes, but we didn’t have snowshoes or anything. We just had our regular boots and a field jacket and anything else we could find.’ Their clothes became so frozen they would grate together like paper. They also suffered from German V-1 rockets, or ‘buzz-bombs’. They could hear them coming, like a persistent drone, then all of a sudden the engine would cut and they would hurtle into the dense fir forest where the battalion was crouching. ‘You didn’t know where they was going to land,’ says Tom, ‘so you’d lie there waiting for the bang.’ Huge craters would be formed, obliterating everything in their wake, and propelling shards of stone and lethal tree splinters in a wide arc.

      But the guardian angel that had been watching over the twins since the day they joined the US Army continued her good work, although Tom and Dee both had their close shaves. Dee was even wounded again on their way back to the front. Having just passed through Bütgenbach, their column was attacked by Allied aircraft. One bomb landed no more than twenty feet from Dee, blowing him up into the air and onto the bank of the road and showering him in mud.

      Tom found him a short while later, standing in the doorway of a building in Bütgenbach, covered in mud and blood. ‘But just by the way he was standing, I could tell it was Dee,’ says Tom, who then took him down to the aid station. After being cleaned up and bandaged, Dee rejoined Company Headquarters. ‘I didn’t go to hospital or anything,’ he says. ‘I’d already been separated from my brother once, so I just stayed with the outfit. I was fine soon enough.’

      Tom had another eerie experience during the Bulge. He was with a new wireman buddy, a replacement named Private William White, and they were laying wires when shells started whistling overhead and exploding nearby. Taking cover by a fence, they waited for the barrage to lift, then heard voices up ahead.

      ‘I’m going to take a look at what’s going on,’ Tom told White. ‘You wait here and I’ll holler for you.’ Moving cautiously forward, he soon found a couple of badly wounded Germans. One had already passed out but on seeing Tom, the other asked him to shoot him to put him out of his misery.

      ‘No,’ Tom told him, ‘I’m not going to shoot you.’ He then called back to White, but there was no answer, and so he shouted again. But White still did not appear. So Tom went back to the fence where he had left White, but he was gone. ‘That son of a gun,’ thought Tom, ‘he’s deserted on me.’ He felt like shooting his buddy when he next caught up with him. Heading back to the command post, Tom reported that White had gone missing.

      That night, it snowed again, and the following morning they moved positions, passing within a few yards of where Tom had been the previous day. He saw two mounds where the Germans had been – evidently they had both died and been buried under the snow. ‘I just looked at them and didn’t say nothing,’ admits Tom. Soon after, White was found, dead. ‘When I left him there,’ says Tom, ‘there must have been some Germans still in the area and they grabbed him after I’d gone forward.’ Later, as White had tried to escape, he had been shot. ‘It СКАЧАТЬ