Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II. James Holland
the enemy retreated. In early September, the battalion moved forward again, this time east towards Germany itself.
For the first time, Tom was able to fully experience the joy of the liberator. They drove through Charleroi past streets lined with cheering crowds. ‘Those people just about pulled us off the Jeeps,’ says Tom. ‘They’d get in with us, and the girls were handing us flowers, grabbing us and kissing us. It was really something.’ These were moments to savour. Tom could not know it then, but ahead lay the toughest, most brutal fighting he would take part in during the entire war.
Tom reckons that that battle for Aachen, King Charlemagne’s capital in the Middle Ages and the first major city inside Germany, was the worst he ever fought. ‘That topped D-Day for me,’ he says. By the beginning of October, the Big Red One had moved into Germany and was holding a line roughly south and east of the city; the attack was to be launched on 2 October, with the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry given the job of capturing the town of Verlautenheide to the east of the city. Having done this, they were then to prepare defensive positions against possible counter-attacks from the German garrison in Aachen itself.
Tom was given a glimpse of what was to come when he first approached the edge of the town on an eerily misty October morning. A knocked-out car lay to the side of the road and sitting on the roof was a body – with no legs, no arms, and no head. ‘The torso was all that was left,’ says Tom. ‘I thought: this is going to be rough …’ The town was taken later that day, but Verlautenheide stood perched on the eastern end of a long ridge, and the fight for this ridge and the neighbouring Crucifix Hill was bitter and hard-fought with the Germans repeatedly counter-attacking. Headquarters Company was based in a three-storey building in the town, and Tom says that for four days and four nights he barely slept as they came under almost continual bombardment and had to repair damaged wires throughout the fighting. One night, Tom and his buddy had to mend a line down to H Company. Slowly, they inched forward, feeling their way through the darkness, the line as their guide. They stopped by a large tree that had been felled by the bombing near a building where H Company had set up their machineguns. They traced the wire, made the repair, and then called back to Company HQ to test it. But the line was still dead. So they crawled forward again. By now, they were doing everything they could to avoid being out in the open – at night, they were all too aware that one of the H Company machinegunners might mistake them for Germans and open fire. They mended another break, but again, the line was still dead. Eventually, they crawled all the way to the wall of the building and, sitting crouched under a window, could see that the wire led right inside. They called up Company HQ again. ‘The wire’s good,’ Tom told them, ‘so we’ll go inside and try and find out what’s going on.’ Suddenly, machinegun fire opened up from the windows above them.
‘Get yourselves back!’ Company HQ told them as Tom and his buddy frantically pressed themselves against the wall. ‘H Company’s not in that building anymore – the Germans are!’ As stealthily and quietly as they could, they crawled back to the comparative safety of the tree, then feeling their way along the wire, scampered back to safety.
Another time, Tom was crossing the cemetery next to the building where Company HQ was based, when two shells screamed over, one exploding only fifteen feet from where he was. The blast knocked his helmet forward and cut his nose. Otherwise he was fine, but as he got up again he heard someone shouting. ‘They’d just been bringing up some replacements,’ says Tom, ‘and one of them was hit.’ Tom hurried over and helped the man to the aid station. ‘I had his blood all over me as well as my own blood from my nose, so as I laid him down, these medics rushed over and asked me how badly I was hurt,’ says Tom. ‘It’s not me,’ he told them, ‘it’s this guy here.’ He has no idea whether the man he helped survived. Replacements were now coming in all the time, and, as he points out, ‘you were half-gone by loss of sleep’; there was little or no energy left to worry too much about others. It was whilst still at Verlautenheide that he helped another wounded GI. The man had been hit in his half-track and Tom was asked to help get him out. The man was heavy and it was not easy lifting him up, but Tom did his best and managed to get him to the cover of a building and lay him down. No sooner had he done so than the man gasped one last time and died. Tom looked down at him and saw he was wearing a crucifix round his neck. ‘I looked up,’ recalls Tom, ‘and said, “Well, he’s yours,” like I was talking to the Lord.’
By the time Company HQ moved again, only the basement of the building they’d been in remained. The storeys above them had vanished 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