Two Foes to Fight

R. Brownlee Welsh

Description

Two Foes to Fight recounts the experiences of a young solider during the Battle of the Bulge and finding his love during Operation Paperclip
In spite of having a stone bridge blow up in your face and an eighty-eight shell whizz by your ear as leader of an Armored Task Force consisting of Light tanks, Mediun tanks, half tracks and trucks full of Infantry, halfway across Germany; or leader of the Battalion Tiger Patrol in the Battle of the Bulge, conducting nightly missions going being the lines in the bunkered Dragon's Teeth, looking for prisoners, only to start a fire fight, setting off Hitler's Final Protective Line in the middle of the night; nothing was more intimidating than the 87th Infantry Division's first attack relieving the 26th Infantry Division in the Saar valley, where dead bodies of this outfit, still in their overcoats, were strewn out all over the slope where we were to attack.

Sujets

• Historical
• Lettres et linguistique
• Operación Paperclip
• Biography
• 87th Division
• Operation Paperclip
• Battle of the Bulge
• World War II
• La Bataille des Ardennes
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: LifeRich Publishing
• Date de parution: 25 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781489747167
• Langue: English

Extrait

TWO FOES TO FIGHT
By
R. Brownlee Welsh
In the
Battle of the Bulge
as:
Infantry Platoon Leader
Tiger Patrol Leader
Calvary Task Force Leader
Armored Force Tanker
Operation Paperclip
Dedicated to Charles R. Willard, Jr,
Vietnam, March 5, 1945 to January 7, 1970.
 


 
Copyright © 2023 R. Brownlee Welsh.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
LifeRich Publishing is a registered trademark of The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.
 
 
LifeRich Publishing
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
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ISBN: 978-1-4897-4715-0 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4897-4714-3 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4897-4716-7 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023906275
 
 
 
LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 07/19/2023
CONTENTS
Preface
 
Siegfried Pillbox
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1932
Fort Bragg: Induction
Camp Wheeler: Basic Training
Mississippi State
Fort Benning: Officer Candidate School
Fort Jackson
Debarkation
Knutsford, England
The Channel
Red Ball Express
March to the Front
Obergailbach
Neidergailbach
Gersheim
Missing in Action
The Bulge
Tiger Patrol
Tiger Patrol at Bloody Crossroads
Luxembourg
Echternach
The Phone
Phonomania
Observation Post Kaput
St. Hubert
The Ardennes
Chapter 1January 12, 1945
Back to the Infantry
The Cavalry
The Siegfried Line
The Rhineland
The Battle for Central Germany
The Shermans
The Heavy Weapons Company
The Light Tanks
The Tank Destroyer Battalion
Leave to Cannes
Redeployment
Operation Paperclip
The Reserves
PREFACE
Fifty years after the victory in Europe my wife called me from the bathroom at 7:00 o’clock in the morning saying I had a phone call from Billings, Montana. It was Jim Shaw, one of my rifle platoon, saying he was my runner back in the Saar Valley and began reminiscing about our experiences during our first engagements of the 87 th Infantry Division of Patton’s Third Army. After playing the “do you remember so and so” he then astounded me with the announcement that our platoon sergeant Les Gibbons, had threatened to shoot me.
No one knew from one second of the next whether he would be killed, wounded, or just scarcely missed. In every war the seems to be a cleansing effect in spite of the carnage and a new beginning falls to mankind, only to be repeated over and over again.
This treatise is but another recounting of history with possibly a way to give some tribute to those who were felled. A monument would not be big enough nor a hymn sufficiently powerful enough to symbolize their valor and their remembrance.
On recounting any successes and failures during my war I had realized that the primary goal of any commander is to “Remember The Mission.” I, myself had succeeded in very few.
Names long forgotten and battles long repressed were recalled to the point that notes were taken attempting to analyze such an astounding announcement that even one of my own was an enemy. It’s like the Nazis weren’t enough to battle. I had Two Foes to Fight.
Bob Welsh
SIEGFRIED PILLBOX
“Hey Bobby, I can’t see in here!” yelled Tommy from the back of the cave that we kids had been digging for a week. “Let’s go up to the corner where they’re fixin’ the road and swipe a smudge pot tonight.”
He was referring to one of those smoky, coal-oil-filled, bowling ball-shaped pots that lined a highway under repair on the roadway in the old days.
“Great idea, but it’d be smelly in here in a minute. It’s too bad Mother made us quit playing with those rubber guns we had to fight Butch and his gang who were always attacking us. Now we don’t have any protection. I just hope they don’t want to block off this entrance while we’re in here,” I replied.
“It was a lot of fun putting our play money in my sister Jean’s bank, in our garage, then going in with our rubber guns to hold it up and make our getaway. This is a good hideout, but being in this dark ole hole is scary.”
I was now Second Lieutenant Robert Welsh on night patrol with the mission of capturing a German prisoner from amongst the snowy bunkers of the Siegfried Line, and I wished I were back in those carefree days of playing in a cave and only shooting rubber guns with my pals. Now I was engaged in a deadly exercise of determination and will to survive.
Our division had joined the Third Army in December and was initially positioned down in the Saar Valley just a couple of weeks before Hitler had launched this famed effort through the Ardennes, making what was to be called the Bulge. I had left the rest of the patrol back in the ditch alongside the Dragon’s Teeth and was scouting alone for some German guards. I would then go back and bring them up.
This, for weeks, had been an arduous task, for instead of capturing any, we had always ended up in a firefight. There shouldn’t be a repeat of the German offensive as of last month, but whatever was going on, HQ wanted to know about it. Right now. The Bulge created by the surprise attack back in December through the Ardennes had been closed back to the West Wall, where it started a month ago.
I just knew that my fraternity brother at Davidson, Crawford Wheeler, had been killed or captured when the main thrust of the surprise attack went right through the area occupied by his 106 th Division. We had been bunkmates all through basic training and OCS.
The Americans and British were now to push to the Rhine River and end Hitler’s dream of a Thousand-Year Reich. To do that, he was in Africa searching for God’s Ark and had stumbled upon a UFO base in Antarctica. He was attempting to copy their technique.
The trouble was that our own artillery was shelling this line of bunkers I was now scouting, with the barrage figured to be in this vicinity pretty soon, and there was absolutely no cover to take except inside a bunker. I would be right out in the open. I couldn’t imagine any guards being out in this melee.
But this wasn’t sporadic shelling, one here and one there. This was a lazy artillery man’s way of just following orders to shell the line. One after another of left-click and fire. Anybody could tell when the next round would be coming in on their position and just take cover, so I just ignored it for the time being. Furthermore, this patrol has been useless for no Kraut in his right mind would be out on guard tonight. It was a dark, dark night, even though the snow reflected any possible light, thus magnifying it only a little.
Suddenly it seemed a shell was due on my position in a few seconds and the only cover was inside a bunker. I had accidentally run across a narrow-gauge rail track and was following it right up to a bunker silhouetted against the skyline. I had arrived at its steel door just as a shell’s whirring round indicated it would be landing right on top of me.
I had only a second to decide whether to duck inside with the Germans or take my chances that the shell would explode on the other side of this bunker. Hitting the ground was out of the question. The terrain was too flat.
Capture or fight inside—or death outside? One or the other.
I tried the door, it opened, and I jumped inside.
As I slammed the door, KARUMPPPFFF!, the earth shook with a resounding concussion as the big shell ripped in the snow nearby, spraying the wall of my sanctuary with shrapnel and slush.
There I was, standing in the middle of a completely blacked-out German bunker.
Strangely there was no light at all. So I just planted myself in a challenging half crouched position with my carbine projecting from the hip, feet set apart twisting in the darkness, sweeping from right to left, ready to shoot.
I was holding my breath with the hair standing up on the back of my neck, waiting to hear a challenge in German, a halloo, or some snoring or at least breathing.
Now I wished I had one of the new automatic firing carbines like our first sergeant was sporting around back in Luxembourg, and a vision of those seven-shot automatic rubber guns we made as kids flashed through my mind. There was no light in here, not even a smudge pot.
As I swiveled my body around as if I were spraying, I thought better of firing at nothingness and just waited.
“I am getting hysterical,” I said to myself.
Soon my breath started coming in short bursts of fear even though there were no sounds or movement at all, especially after all that racket I made coming in. Two minutes or two seconds went by. How many?
Then I begin to realize there was no one else in this bunker but me. Nothing but complete and total, dead silence.
Finally, I figured this must be an ammo bunker since those tracks leading up to it would be necessary for carts carrying the weight of those big shells.
My imagination had overcome me. My anxiety fell