Baptism By Fire Recollections of WWII June 2006

by Wes Fitzgerald
Photos by Time Life/ US Coast Guard & Russell Byrne

We were given some clean-up details, and one of our guys became the unit’s first casualty when a landmine he was clearing detonated. Later one of our captains accidentally killed himself with a captured German pistol and was buried on Thanksgiving Day.

Some of my comrades in Company B complained that the war seemed to be passing us by and wished they could join the Second Infantry Division so they could see some action. They obviously had no idea of what we were going to face during the course of the next two years.

In the Beginning
I was born March 30, 1925 in Vallejo and was raised in San Francisco. My father was a Marine Paymaster on Harrison Street, but he dropped out of the family picture early in my life. Like everyone else in those days, the Fitzgerald family didn’t have much money so I started selling papers when I was five years old. I was working to help support my mother and younger brother by selling the Call Bulletin for three cents apiece. After I had sold ten papers I would earn one penny.

When I got a little older I joined the other newsies in “boot jacking,” which consisted of hopping streetcars and hawking my papers to the passengers. After a few blocks, when I had sold a copy to everyone buying, I would get off and then jump on the next streetcar that came along heading back in the direction I had come from. I would continue that routine until my papers were gone. Later, during high school, I got a job working for Western Union delivering telegrams by riding my bike up and down the San Francisco hills.

On December 7, 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the world changed forever. I got a job at the Richmond Kaiser Shipyard as a welder when I was 17 years old. I lied about my age to get around a rule requiring welders to be at least 18 before they could work night shifts. I later had the opportunity of taking a better job working for the Navy at the Hunter’s Point Matson Navigation company. The managers at the Richmond Shipyard were angry at my leaving them so they reported me to the Draft Board.

The people at Hunter’s Point wanted to keep me in the Navy as a Seabee, but I had a problem with the physical when albumin was found in my urine. They put me on a ten-day treatment plan and said that I could then sign up with the Navy. But I found myself drafted into the Army before the ten days were up.

I was engaged to Lucille, but met her friend Wilma shortly before I shipped out on March 18, 1943. Lucile and I double-dated with a guy we called Poor Pete. She and Wilma watched me board the train with tears in their eyes. While I was gone Lucille married someone else. Wilma faithfully wrote to me throughout the war. She knew we weren’t going to be at a Sunday School Picnic so, perhaps as an insurance policy, she also wrote to another soldier named Sam Closi, who now lies buried just down the hill from Admiral Halsey in San Bruno’s Golden Gate Cemetery.

I went to Monterey for shots and tests. They asked me what I wanted to do and I told them I wanted to join an armored battalion. I figured that as a member of an armored unit I wouldn’t have to do as much walking as the foot soldiers. They shipped me to Fort Knox where I was supposed to begin training on tanks and half-tracks, but when I got there I discovered the soldiers at Fort Knox were still drilling with horses.

I eventually became part of a new unit called the Armored Infantry Group. I was in the First Platoon, B Company, of the 256 Battalion. The 256 was part of no brigade, but was a separate mobile fighting force using half-tracks equipped with 50 caliber machine guns. We had the distinction of being the sole separate combat armored infantry battalion of World War II. At the beginning of the fighting there were 40 of us in my platoon. We went into harms way in all four of the big European campaigns.

Into Harms Way
The 256 went into Belgium where we spent our days drilling and marching. One night the notice came down, “Stow all your gear, we’re moving out.” We imagined that it was yet another training mission. But almost before we realized what was happening, the next morning, December 18, 1944, we found ourselves assaulting the German stronghold at Malmédy in the Ardennes forest. The Battle of the Bulge had begun.

Our assignment was to look for the main line of German resistance, and I think we found it. It was a hellish battle because the Germans knew we were coming and had ranged their guns in on our attack positions before the battle began. During those opening battles we were like ducks in a German shooting gallery. One machine gun would be firing high, another firing low, and they were cutting apart B Company like we were vegetables in a dicing machine. That was our baptism by fire. For the first time we heard live bullets whizzing by our ears and saw buddies dying before our eyes. When we entered the besieged town of Malmédy that evening, the townsfolk greeted us by playing Yankee Doodle on the bells of the town’s large church.

The Battle of the Ardennes eventually involved 500,000 German soldiers in 29 divisions, which were part of three German armies. This enormous amount of men and material was concentrated along a line that was only eight miles long. At the beginning of the battle we found ourselves outgunned and outmanned by soldiers who were better equipped and trained than we were.

We were facing Nazi troops who were from Hitler’s elite forces. Those soldiers were handsome, highly trained, and very effective fighters. They were also crafty and did things like turn the signs around at intersections so that we ran into the Germans instead of away from them. A special sabotage group had been trained to speak English and were outfitted with American uniforms and equipment.

During that winter-time combat the Nazi soldiers were dressed in white snow suits while we were fighting in our dark-colored light-weight uniforms. Some of the civilians living in the area gave us sheets off their beds and we would go into battle with white bedclothes draped over our uniforms so we wouldn’t be silhouetted against the snow. Some of us also covered our helmets with towels and even long johns. A group of our guys once passed some soldiers waiting along the road who hollered at them, “Go get them, Snow White.” The sheets provided ineffective insulation, however, and we were freezing in the winter cold. In many cases we were fighting out of foxholes that had ice water in the bottom.

The beautiful German Tiger Royal was the best tank in the war. The crews decorated them with ominous skull and crossbones emblems and, in fact, they were terrible killing machines. Each Tiger carried a huge 88 mm gun. When they fired one of those things the shell sounded like a railway train coming past your ear – and those shells kept coming past my ear more times than I can remember.

We lost a lot a boys, and some of them were my buddies from Company B. By December 20 most of the men in Company B were dead, injured, or missing in action. The fighting reduced B Company’s strength to about 40 soldiers – the same number of my platoon by itself at the beginning. Before the battle was over the bodies of dead Americans were stacked like cordwood around Malmédy.

Heroic Victories
Before long we began to make inroads against the Germans. Our 57 mm anti-tank guns were successful in taking out a few of the Royal Tiger tanks, and we planted landmines in daisy chains across roads that destroyed a number of others. The other way to stop Tiger Royals was to shoot bazooka rounds into the tracks, which would disable them. We would then make Molotov cocktails out of bottles of gasoline using rags for wicks. One of us would dash up to the immobile tank and if the tank gunners didn’t kill us, we would throw the bottle of gasoline into the hot engine. We didn’t even have to light it. The gasoline would ignite and fill the crew compartment with flames and smoke. As the members of the tank crew would come out, we would pop them with our machine guns.

It’s a terrible thing to kill another human being, of course. But in the heat of battle we had a sense of exaltation and felt that we were getting some of our own back for the awful things they were doing to us. Those German soldiers looked dashing and handsome but were terrible human beings. They were evil fanatics who would have killed their own parents if the Fuehrer had told them to do so. In one atrocity they marched 84 captured Ally soldiers into a field and then the commander, Colonial Joachim Peiper, brought a bunch of trucks full of guns into the field, backed them up, dropped the tailgates, and the German soldiers machine-gunned the helpless American prisoners to death. Company B uncovered the evidence of this atrocity on New Year’s Day. We stumbled across some snow-covered humps in a field and discovered that they were stacks of dead American soldiers lying in groups on top of one another. Many of them had been shot in the head.

In addition, we saw evidence of German atrocities in the bodies of numerous mutilated civilians the Germans left behind them in the snow. We captured German soldiers who were carrying vials of sulfuric acid which they were supposed to throw into the eyes of their American captors.

“Deutschland über alles,” the soldiers would sometimes shout as we killed them, which means “Germany above all.” Or they would shout “Heil Hitler!” We would feel good about sending them to their graves. “You don’t want to die for your country,” the drill sergeants used to tell us, “You want to make your enemies die for their country.”

Our success in winning the conflict was fueled by gasoline. The only thing the Germans didn’t have in plenty was fuel for their Royal Tiger tanks. Hitler had ordered the Germans into the December battle despite the fact that two trainloads of fuel had not yet arrived.

As we retreated from the superior German forces, Captain Mitchell blew up our fuel dumps, holding more than three million gallons of fuel, to keep the Germans from getting it. Some of the soldiers also reportedly filled a ditch with 124,000 gallons of fuel and set it ablaze in order to turn back an armored German reconnaissance team. The Germans had better tanks, but they had to abandon those beautiful machines beside the roads with dry fuel tanks.

I was with Patton’s group. He lead us to victory by blood and guts. “I don’t want to see a truck come up here with food on it,” he said. “Just gasoline for the tanks.” He was a great general! We went hungry, for sure; the food was terrible and not much of it. But Patton understood what he was doing. He knew that we wouldn’t actually starve to death without the food, but without the gas we could not have won the battle.

We finally stopped the Germans in their tracks at Bastogne and Mamonde. This was Hitler’s defeat at the Battle of the Bulge. By the end of the fighting in the Ardennes the Germans had lost a third of their combat troops, plus an enormous amount of material, including 95 tanks.

Wartime Perils
War is hell they say and I guess it is, but it was a freezing cold hell at times. While fighting my way through the Ardennes forest I froze my feet. The quacks working in the medical tent were treating me for athlete’s foot. Blood poisoning began to set in and I was in a bad way when a medical officer, named Captain Berlin, finally examined my feet and immediately transferred me to a real army medical facility in Frankfurt where effective treatments certainly saved my feet, and probably my life.

Friendly fire was a heartbreaking part of the hell we were going through. In one terrible mistake on Dec. 23rd American B-26 bombers dropped 60 bombs on Malmédy killing 125 civilians and seven American soldiers. This astonishing act was repeated again the next two days – on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I guess the pilots’ charts inaccurately labeled Malmédy as one of the towns that remained in enemy hands.

As the war progressed, death also began to rain down on us from the skies in the form of the Nazi B1 “Buzz Bombs.” These unguided missiles were terrifying because they only came down when they ran out of fuel. They were subsonic and their engines would make a completely audible “put-put-put” sound followed by deadly silence as the instruments of death began falling towards the earth.

That silence scared the hell out of us because you couldn’t tell where they were going to come down. It was like being trapped in a dark room with someone who was firing random shots.

In one hot battle in the Ardennes a German machine gun was firing at us. My buddy, Private Will Watson, got angry and decided to knock it out. Will was a hillbilly preacher from Kentucky who had walked into boot camp without shoes. He ran up to the “pill box” where the machine gun was placed and tossed a grenade through the window slit. One of the dying Germans shot Will right through his throat. They brought him back on a board stretched out across the seats of a Jeep. “Give me a drink, will you, Wes?” he asked me. “Are you crazy?” I said. I could see that the water would have run right out through the holes in his neck.

Unlike the grim experiences of so many of our fighting men during those dark days, Will’s story had a happy ending. Ten years ago, in a reunion held in his beloved Kentucky, Private Will Watson played the Battle Hymn of the Republic on his fiddle for us. I don’t know if there was a dry eye in the place, but I sure didn’t have one.

After the War
After two years of warfare they sent what was left of us back to Wiesbaden in Germany and from there we were sent home on a ship. When I got home I went to see Wilma. On September 15, we’ll be celebrating 60 years of marriage.

At the end of the war I was given the Bronze Star, the Combat Infantry Badge, and Battle Stars for each of the four major campaigns I had been part of – Northern France, the Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, and Central Europe.

When I first returned from Europe, I couldn’t talk about my experiences. I didn’t want to remember the events I had witnessed. I felt like I’d had enough and didn’t want any more. In 1970, however, we toured Europe and I revisited the places where I had fought. The areas had been beautifully rebuilt. The visit was a healing experience, I think.

I was discharged from the Army in Marysville. Some friends gave me a ride and dropped me off in Oakland, where I took a ferry to San Francisco and then caught a streetcar for home. I remember that I stood next to the conductor on that ride home. I felt neglected and just a little sorry for myself. There was no parade and no fuss. I felt that I needed to hear somebody say “Thanks!”

A wonderful development during the past few years has been that people are now saying thanks to us veterans. Even young kids will sometimes thank us for the sacrifices we made.

On October 7, 2005, I attended the 60th year anniversary service at the WWII Memorial in Washington, DC. I was sitting in a wheelchair and Vice President Dick Cheney, himself, came by and shook hands with me. “Thank you,” he said. Later he stood before us all and said:

I count it a privilege to stand in the presence of men who were sent into battle by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and who, by their courage, honor, and devotion to duty, helped win a war and change the course of history.

I don’t feel arrogant about what we WWII veterans did and have no desire to insist that people show gratitude to us. Nevertheless, the truth is that we probably would be speaking German if we had lost the Battle of the Bulge, or any of the other three major campaigns on the European front.