The anniversary of D-Day made me remember the last month leading up to the end of World War II in Europe. I was assigned to B troop 121st Cavalry Recon. Squadron (called the Bird Dogs),
On April 1st 1945, right after they had crossed over the Rhine fiver. I was given the job as the ammo man and bartender in the back of a half-track. The front of the half track was loaded with ammunition and the back with confiscated cognac.
The first day we mounted up after breakfast at Darmstadt and headed north toward the Mainz river. Along about midday, we were fired on by a self-propelled rocket gun (called a screaming mimi by the Americans). The first shell hit in front of our halftrack throwing dirt in my face. The next one hit behind us, so I took off for the ditch. The next shell hit to my left, the shrapnel denting my helmet as I went into the ditch. The shrapnel landed in front of me, and burnt the grass. Like a fool I picked it up burning my index finger and thumb. I prayed, and promised if I got through this I would go to church every Sunday. I haven’t kept this promise completely, but I still try to go to church, as much as managable.
A tank pulled up beside me. I looked up and saw it was ours. It started firing and hit a barn. It was full of ammunition and exploded, silencing the rocket gun.
Where we crossed the Mainz a road sign read Frankfurt 10 Km west, but we kept going north to the town of Fulda. There we turned southeast back toward the Mainz river. We mounted up about midnight in a rainstorm and started up a hollow. The point bantam (a jeep was called a bantam in the Cavalry) got stuck in the mud, so the point armored car tried to pull it out and got stuck also. So we tried to pull it out with our halftrack and got it stuck. The whole troop got stuck in the mud and spinned all night until some tanks were brought in to get us out. One German prisoner we captured claimed that the reason the Germans were losing the war was that the German intelligence couldn’t figure out what the Americans were doing because the Americans didn’t know themselves what they were doing. He wasn’t far from right.
I don’t have room to tell all the battle stories, so I’ll just hit the high points. We went from Fulda to Schweinfurt and Lichtenfels into Bamburg, where there was quite a battle. Then to Nuremberg, where there was an even bigger battle. We went around Nuremberg into a little suburb named Roth, where we caught Germans trying to escape Nuremberg.
Then we headed southeast again toward the Danube river at Neuberg. The engineers had built a bridge over the Danube, but the French, thinking it was German, had bombed it out. So we got a rest while the engineers built it back again.
We went from Neuberg through Freising to Rosenheim where we could see the outline of the Alp mountains. After chow we bedded down for the night only to be awakened about midnight with the dreaded order to mount up; but this time it was different. Instead of back roads with lights out we got on the autobahn with lights on and went full speed all night arriving at the Inn river across from Salzburg, Austria at dawn. The highway bridge was bombed out, so we went across the railroad bridge. In Salzburg German general Von Ribbentrop surrendered the last German army to our commander, Colonel Wilson.
I walked up the street and came upon a German soldier guarding Russian prisoners. He handed me his burp gun and wanted to see my rifle. He said, “Now that you have whipped us, why don’t we get together and go whip the Russians?” I replied, “No thanks, I’ve had enough!”
THE END