2.  FIELD NOTES

Epstein McClellan, my Dad, worked his way through Purdue University. The ROTC furnished his uniforms, then called in the debt. Shortly after I was born came Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. And Dad began training for war. Promotion was rapid; he was Captain of Field Artillery by the time he saw his first German dead, in a bunker off the coast of France, corpses jellied by a rain of shells.

History is written by the winners, someone said. But after half a century and more history’s verdict remains, that in World War II the victors were worthy, the victory necessary. It takes very little reading of Adolph Hitler’s "Mein Kampf" to detect beneath his prose the softened brain of a madman.

"More than any other time in history," Eisenhower told the British people as D Day approached, "we find the forces of evil ranged against those of decency and respect for the human mind."

As the sun brightened the horizon, June 6, 1944, the mother of a fishing family on the Normandy coast of France heard the distant thunder of guns. She watched the fog lift from the water to reveal a sea paved with ships as far as her eyes could scan, all round the horizon’s curve. The sky was likewise clouded with oncoming planes. Her intuition was as immediate and deep as her surprise: Hitler would soon be dead, it was inevitable.

The Normandy Invasion continued day after day until over four million troops had landed. It remains the largest amphibious invasion in history, and singular in its success.

Dad’s outfit, the 751st. Field Artillery, was part of Patton’s Third Army, which, with Hodges’ First Army and Patch’s Seventh, comprised General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group, which, along with British and Canadian forces under Field Marshal Sir Bernard L. (Monty) Montgomery, were commanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In practice everyone tried to keep up with General George C. (Blood and Guts) Patton.

The field artillery of the time had an effective range of about eight miles, maybe twelve; so Dad’s outfit brought up the rear, about six miles behind the advancing front.

On July 9 Monty’s Canadians took the French coastal city of Caen. A week later Americans entered St. Lo. On August 23-25 the Germans were driven from Paris; Patton allowed the Free French forces under General Leclerc to lead the way. A few days later Captain McClellan was trying to maneuver his considerable tonnage of ironware through the narrow streets of that city….

"We were supposed to follow a series of side streets that paralleled the Seine River," Dad said. "We were supposed to follow that until we came out on the east side of Paris, and that way avoid all the main part of the city.

"We were about halfway through Paris when, lo and behold, we came to an overpass, and here was a British truck with a drag-line on it, jammed up under the overpass. They’d pulled underneath like they were going right on through, and they were fastened; they couldn’t move backward, forward, or sideways.

"Right then a decision had to be made, and I was stuck with the job. When an army travels, each unit is allotted a certain space on the highway, and your space travels with you. If your space stops, then everybody else’s stops, too. There was a little side street that led off to the right, and I thought, ‘I’ll go down that side street and hit another street going east, and get out of here without waiting for those boogers to get that vehicle out.’ I don’t know how they ever did get it loose.

"So we went down the side street. It was so narrow that, when people saw us coming, they had to lean up against the wall to let us pass. They had no room to walk. Soon we came to a street that was going east. So we turned left—and came out onto the Champs Elysees, the main street of Paris. We were not supposed to be there, but in war things happen that are not supposed to happen. No one tried to stop us.

"So we went rattling and clanking down the Champs Elysees without incident, and came out on the east side of Paris. I forget where we bivouacked that night. We bivouacked the next night east of Compiegne. And we found out we were attached to the 19th. Corps, ^{which was attached to the British Army. So, we pulled out into some fields and did nothing for a couple of weeks but sit there."}

…

"We sat there for a couple of weeks," Dad said, "at this place. We were out in French farm country, beautiful hills and valleys and pastures and farm animals. Nice, not too rough. But we found out later, this was when things were cooking up for Operation Market Garden.

"After a week or two we got orders to move, to go on up through Liege toward Aachen. The Germans still held it. So we moved out; it was an all day march. But they had taken all our trucks away from us to haul ammunition and supplies from way back yonder on the beach, four-hundred miles away. We had to use assistant drivers and borrow vehicles to move the lighter guns."

…

It is now over three months into the invasion that began on the beaches of Normandy. The First Army crossed from France into Belgium on September 11. Operation Market Garden, an airborne invasion of Holland, began September 17. According to Mike Lorfing, "Market Garden was a fiasco. Allied intelligence failed to notice that the best German divisions were conducting field exercises there."

…

"We moved up just west of Aachen," Dad said, "and got into position, where we were to support an attack to retake the city from the Germans. We didn’t do any shooting there, but we were in place to shoot if we were called on.

"Aachen was taken while we sat there. Then we were ordered to take our guns and tractors to the ordnance depot and have them checked over. We did that. Then all of a sudden we got orders to move out the next morning; and our guns and tractors were down at the ordnance depot ten miles away."
…

Aachen, within twenty miles of the German border, was finally taken on October 12. As Miller’s history records, the Americans "found it a city of desolation and ruin." Mike Lorfing notes, "We visited Aachen when in Europe. The whole town is littered with memorials to the fights that took place there. By the way, the present mayor of the town is rabidly anti-American and has made shameful statements about our military."

…

"Meanwhile," Dad said, "we’d got our drivers back. We went down to ordnance about noon to find out why our guns weren’t back. And they hadn’t done a dang thing with them. We did have one gun an air brake wasn’t working on, so I sent the other guns back to our camp area, and stayed with that one until I got someone to fix it—which was like pulling teeth, to get those sons of guns to do anything. They were enjoying their good times and were too busy to work.

"In the mean time one of the other three guns had slid off the road and nearly upset. We finally got everything together. About nine o’clock that night we were ready to go. It was very dark when we pulled onto the road between Liege and Aachen. When we got up onto the road, we found ourselves in fog.

"I was driving on in the jeep up ahead. We couldn’t have any lights, naturally, except the guide-lights, little green lights about the size of a burning cigarette. We started down the highway in the fog and the dark, and all the time we were meeting ambulances, coming out of Aachen, just one right after another. They must have been expert drivers, because they were really going fast.

"The driver of the lead tractor stopped, and stopped the column. I backed up to find out what the problem was, and he said, ‘I can’t see, I can’t—I’m afraid.’ The road was on a ridge, and if you got off of it you could tumble down an embankment about fifty feet high. So I told him, ‘Well, you get in the jeep here, and I’ll have a try at it.’ So I got in the tractor and drove it on in."

"We got into Aachen some time after midnight, and the next morning before daylight we pulled out to go north. We were going into the area where Market Garden was going on, toward Maastricht.

"When we got up there, the boys—I couldn’t get them to pep up any. We were going into position to start firing any time we were called on, and these boys just didn’t have any life in them at all. I thought, my gosh. So I asked some of them, ‘What in the world is the matter with you guys?’ ‘Well,’ they said, ‘as we came up, we passed a big graveyard, where they had our boys laid out, stacked up in ricks like cordwood, getting them ready for burial.’

"This was the first time they’d seen any real evidence of what always happens in a war, somebody gets killed. And they were pretty de-pressed! I tried to convince them that they were lucky it hadn’t happened to them…yet. At any rate, we finally got organized, and they were a pretty optimistic bunch.

"We did quite a bit of firing there for a few days. We had an observation post in a little village out ahead of us about three or four miles, and we could see a lot of traffic on a highway a couple of miles away. With high-powered glasses, we could see lots of German Army vehicles moving south. Nobody attached any importance to it at the time. But later we found out what was going on: the Germans were trying to outflank us.

"Of course we fired at them, but it’s hard to do anything against vehicles with artillery at a long range. You have to pick the vehicle, figure out how fast it’s going, figure out how far away it is, and land a shell on it—It’s pretty much a waste of ammunition."

…

"Time passed," Dad said. "The next move we made, we moved east, to the southeast of Aachen. And here we went into action. We did quite a bit of firing. Of course, we got shelled occasionally. I was censoring letters, and one boy wrote home, "At last we’ve hit pay dirt.’ I guess that’s what he meant, someone was finally shooting back.

"We stayed in that position for a week or ten days. One of the things about being attached to the British Army, you could sit and sit—Like the British boys would say, ‘You have to wait for Monty to get his tail up.’ We would sit and sit, and all of a sudden Monty would get his tail up and we’d start.

"At any rate, we were southeast of Aachen, here again out in beautiful farming country. The grass was green, the cattle were out in the fields—almost make you homesick; make you wonder what the dickens it was all about.

"Finally we got orders to move up, and we moved up again, six or seven miles.

"All this time you would see such weird things going on. Like, I remember when we moved, the unit commanders all had to go up to Corps Headquarters, in Aachen, to get our instructions. It was about ten o’clock at night, nice moonlit night. And there was a lot of activity going on in the air; bombers going over and coming back from deep into Germany, and the Germans were shooting them down…

"Those poor devils in those bombers—the plane would catch fire, and they’d try to get out and they would catch fire; you’d see them coming down, their parachute on fire. They were up there four or five miles into the air, and you could see the tracer bullets from the pursuit planes slicing into the bombers. It wasn’t any fun to watch."

…

"We got our billets for the night," Dad said, "found out where we could spend the night. And the next day the Battery Execs came up. We went for breakfast and found out where we were going to go into position.

"We were nearly five miles almost due east of Aachen. We went into position there in the fields. We got dug in, and started giving out occasional fire when it was called for. Mostly it was sitting there and waiting for someone to holler for something, and watching what went on around us.

"Every once in a while the Germans would throw something over at us. You never knew what it was going to be or when: mortar shells and eighty-eights. So we had to be prepared to duck into a hole on very short notice. But nobody got hurt.

"I believe it in was on November 11 that the Battery Executive Officer got pneumonia, puttering around in the mud and the rain, so they hauled him off to the hospital; and the same night the Germans started shelling our area. I had to drive from the Battery Headquarters to the Exec Post to check and make sure that everything was in order.

"While I was gone, a big shell hit the house where we had our Battery Headquarters in the front room. It was a good sized house, and there were people living in the rest of the house. These people—we didn’t know it for sure at the time, but we could see evidence of it—they had been sheltering some downed German airmen. They had a little crawl space underneath the house, and they’d been keeping the airmen down in the crawl space, making sure they got food. But now, of course, they were our friends.

"Anyway, the shell hit the upper part of the house, and this lady was screaming and going on something awful. The First Sergeant and I went upstairs to find out what was going on. The shell had blown down a bedroom wall, and the bed was covered with debris. The woman had been downstairs and thought her husband was in the bed. But when we scratched our way down through the debris, we discovered there was no one there. About this time the old man came from out in the shed. He’d been sleeping in the haymow.

"My aides, the First Sergeant, the Driver, the Scout Corporal, and the Signal Man, were badly shaken up by the explosion from the shell; and the switchboard was knocked out. But we got everything reorganized and back in shape without incident. Nobody got seriously hurt."

…

"Then, in a couple of days," Dad is saying, "we got orders to move up. This was in mid-November. They had put on a big drive and pushed the Germans back across their own border. So we moved up.

"All this time the weather was rotten. We’d have a week of drizzle and rain, then have a couple of days of a little sunshine, and then more drizzle and rain—and cold. It had begun to get cold. And it would get dark along about four in the afternoon.

"When we moved up, I went ahead with my staff, and we picked out places for the guns. The battery didn’t arrive until nearly dark. And we moved the guns into position and called in, saying we were ready to fire.

"But one of the guns—when the tractor pulled away from the gun, the driver turned and the tread of his tractor caught a mine, and flipped it out. Here we were in the middle of a mine field and hadn’t known it. And there was nothing we could do except call that gun crew out and get them away from the area. We couldn’t do anything else in the darkness, and couldn’t have lights of course.

"The next morning we moved the guns, the whole battery, across the road, which was a much better place; and there were some buildings we could use. We were called on for a good deal of fire there, and we kept pouring it in.

"The next thing, we were called on to move again, so we moved up, another four or five miles closer to the front. Into a little German Catholic village.

"In the rectory of the church—The boys got to prowling around; they’ll do that in spite of everything—In the basement of the rectory the boys found the priest’s liquor supply. There were wines, schnapps, and two or three other things.

"One of these was some really strange stuff. It was an alcoholic beverage all right, but it stunk like holy sheeeee whiz! Some of them tried to drink it anyway, but they had to hold their noses. We found out later what it was—potato whisky. It was potent stuff, all right. The odor was so foul they gave up trying to drink it and tried to use it for lamp fuel, like kerosine. It was flammable, but of course alcohol burns with a blue flame that gives off very little light. So they were disappointed both ways."

…

I can’t but wish for the names of the villages Dad mentions, and the Patron Saint of what he simply calls "the big Catholic church" that dominated this anonymous town.

As for why the priest deserted his church, Hitler was a masterful propagandist. He had convinced the German people that Allied troops were monsters, who would treat them as he, in matter of fact, had been treating the Jews for half a decade: Those who were not killed immediately were enslaved and starved to death.

Meanwhile, the German Army was preparing to stage one last furious attack in defense of their homeland.

…

"In about three or four days we moved up again," Dad said, "to a village near a main crossroads. And right by the edge of the village was a railroad track. I had the guns situated away from the road junction, because heavy artillery likes to use crossroads as a target.

"The Germans certainly had that idea. They kept firing at the crossroads with what sounded like two-tens—That’s about an eight-inch gun. But they were off in their deflection. So every fifteen or twenty minutes you would hear a Whoomp! from over across the railroad embankment; that was the Germans firing at us. They didn’t get wise to that for several days. We sat there for four or five days, firing all the time, while they were shooting at the cross-roads and missing.

"There was another road junction to our left, down about a quarter of a mile, and they fired something—it must’ve been a rocket, a tremendous thing—into that. It plowed into the field there fifty yards from this road junction, plowed up a great furrow and went into the ground, but it didn’t explode.

"We could drive by there and look into the hole, about ten or twelve feet deep, and see the back end of that bloomin’ thing. Some of the boys wanted to shoot at it to explode it. I told them, ‘What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy? It’s not hurting anything, but if you shoot at it with a rifle and it explodes, it might cut you to pieces. That thing must have payload of three hundred and fifty pounds.’

"A few nights later, the Germans got their deflection corrected on the cross roads, and their shells started hitting closer to home. They’d use delayed fuses, and their shells would go into the ground and just blow mud all over everything, but nobody got hurt.

"We were pretty lucky. As artillery, we never really saw any actual enemy action. We could just sit back and watch."

…

"Anyway," Dad said, "we got orders to move up again, and we went up ahead about four or five miles, to the outskirts of another German village. And over to the left of us, to the north, was a sort of a mountain. It was a sizable hill, several hundred feet high, a ridge that included the village and ran back into the mountains to the northwest. And we were supposed to go into position at the toe of that hill. But it was a mud hole.

"About four or five miles up this hill was an old German castle. The Germans had used it for a strong point, and we had lost a lot of men taking it. And from there you could see for miles out across the Roer River valley, nearly all the way to the Rhine.

"When we got back to the bottom of the hill, the Colonel asked me what I thought about going into position there. I said, ‘If we have to, I guess we have to, but it’s going to be suicide; because, if they’ve got anything, which I know they have, they can sit over there several miles away and pick us off one by one. There’s no way we can get any cover or defilade, where we can hide our position.’ So we didn’t go into position there. This happened on into December.

"The next day we got orders to move south and relieve the old historic First Division Field Artillery, who were down near Roetgen, Germany, about twenty miles away.

"The Colonel told me to occupy the position where the middle battery of the old First Field had been. I went with the battery commander. And he says, ‘Man, if you can find a place where you can shoot from, you’d better look it up! I would suggest you not move in where we are. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to get my guns out of there. It’s nothing but a mud-hole.’

"I didn’t even take a second look. I began to look back about three-hundred yards, south, where there was a double-track railroad. It had a good, solid road bed, and curved around the hill to our left.

"So, when the guns came up about one o’clock in the after-noon, I put them into position along that rail-road, where we could haul ammunition to them easily, and where we’d have a pretty solid foundation to shoot from. These guns, the big ones, when they fire a hundred pound shell, there’s quite a kickback. In mud, they’ll bury themselves in three or four rounds. Anyway, we settled in and started shooting.

"Four o’clock that afternoon, they called and said, ‘Send every available truck, even your supply truck and your kitchen truck, to haul ammunition.’ I begged off on the kitchen truck, but we sent all the other trucks, ten trucks from our battery.

"So we started shooting there. And we kept on shooting, day and night. After about three days I began to wonder what the devil was the matter. This was around the 17th. or 18th. of December.

"One of the things a battery commander does, as soon as he gets everything in position and settled down, he starts looking around for alternate positions, places he can move to in case he gets blasted out.

"And I had a honey of a place all picked out, back about a quarter of a mile. But it was occupied by the headquarters of the Thirteenth Cavalry. I’d heard the Thirteenth Cavalry was going to move out, so I stopped by to talk to the Colonel there. I told him ‘I was looking for alternate positions, and I hear you are going to move out, so I’d like to put a hold on this position right here.’

"And this old Colonel says, ‘You want an alternate position, huh? Why, young man, you’ll be lucky as hell if you’re alive tomorrow night.’ I thought he was joking. He said, ‘It’s no joke. The Germans are miles behind us right now. They’re going west like a freight train. They broke through, and they’ve got tanks, infantry, thousands and thousands of men, and they’re just a tearing.’ We were at the beginning of what was to be called ‘the Battle of the Bulge.’

"Needless to say, I didn’t take up any alternate position. I was pretty much in shock. We all were. We just sat tight and kept shooting, day after day, night after night."

…

According to the history books, the Allied command were anticipating a German counter-attack. Nevertheless, the German thrust down through the wooded Ardennes region of Belgium was effective. The Battle of the Bulge continued on, from mid-December through Christmas and into the New Year, 1945. The German attack began with twenty four divisions, led by Hitler’s elite guard. "By January 13," says Miller, "the Allies had destroyed twenty of them." Still, the battle continued through the end of January. Then, having broken the back of Hitler’s Third Reich, the Allies renewed their march into Germany.

Four months later, as the woman in Normandy had foreseen, Hitler was dead. He and his mistress, Eva Braun, had been wed; then, at Hitler’s own order, they were shot and their bodies cremated.

***

When he came back from the war in 1945, Dad got a job as county agent for the Department of Agriculture. But the war had undermined his health. Decayed teeth had to be replaced, and when a dentist drilled into a sinus, that necessitated a sinus operation, the first of a series. An appendectomy revealed that his appendix had already ruptured and formed scar tissue. He’d lived through that due to megadoses of Penicillin given him in a field hospital. Eventually he was hospitalized for severe depression—post traumatic stress disorder, they’d call it now.

We were driving to the VA hospital one day, and I was gazing absently out the car window at Indiana farmland in early summer sun—when suddenly the landscape changed. It was as if a window had opened into another world, where the grass blazed perfect green, the trees, too; the sky was perfect azure; the colors were so intense the scene almost hurt my eyes. Just a glimpse and it was gone, leaving me again looking at ordinary scenery and longing to reenter those bright fields.

…

Tom McClellan

Memorial Day, 2003

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