Honor Before Glory Read online

  “I’m going to lose my leg, aren’t I?” a soldier might ask. Part of a medic’s job in battle was to maintain hope. “No, you’re not going to lose it. You’re going to be all right.” Then Kuwayama and others had dragged those men on a poncho or carried them on a litter to a safer location, perhaps to a primitive aid station. Many aid stations were simply a collection of medical supplies in a gully or on the back side of a hill, presumably out of the direct line of enemy fire. Those aid stations had largely remained in place throughout the day, given the lack of meaningful advance by Hanley’s men.

  The other battalions of the 141st had made minimal progress as well. A substantial German force remained entrenched between them and the 1/141. Despite repeated orders from Lundquist, Higgins had no real ability to fight his way toward friendly forces. At 1840 he radioed Lundquist, “No rations for three days, seven new casualties. Where is our patrol which moved this day in order to meet mission force? Need ammo before attack possible.”13 Higgins’s men weren’t going anywhere, and he was using precious battery power to make that clear to his superior Officer. Cold was about to join the Germans as the 1/141’s enemy.

  MEANWHILE, AT DIVISION HEADQUARTERS, DAHLQUIST WAS realizing the late-afternoon assault had not developed into the breakthrough he sought. The reports from the battlefield had been as disheartening for Lundquist as they likely were infuriating to Dahlquist. Sakato’s Company E had not moved in hours, and two of the platoons had suffered nine casualties. Every platoon leader and noncommissioned officer had been killed or wounded. The company could muster only ten men per patrol. The survivors were pinned down by enemy machine gunners. Company F had dug in for the night, estimating at least one hundred enemy soldiers were a few yards away. Some Germans wore camouflaged and hooded uniforms, indicating they were well trained and probably battle tested.

  The 3/141 reported that it had dug in for the night in front of at least two German companies of one hundred men each. Eight enemy machine gun emplacements had been spotted before nightfall, making the prospect of the next morning’s assault hellacious at best. The battalion had lost two of its three tanks. A messenger from the 3rd Battalion had reached Lundquist’s headquarters and requested multiple litter-bearer squads to follow him back to where wounded men lay in the mud.

  Two battalions of the 141st had failed to reach the 1st Battalion the day before. Now the disappointing progress of three frontline battalions on the 26th had made it increasingly clear that the surrounded men would have to be resupplied directly if they were going to survive until friendly forces reached them. The mission to relieve the 1/141st could soon become a rescue mission.

  The options for resupplying Higgins’s men were limited. Ground resupply was out of the question, as the combat engineers could not build a fresh-cut log road on top of the muddy logging road any closer to Higgins than the infantry could advance. And the engineers were suffering casualties from enemy artillery as they painstakingly converted the muddy route into a wooden surface that could support heavy vehicles.

  It was a tedious and dangerous process. First the road and nearby woods had to be swept for mines. Then earthmovers moved forward to clear the sodden roadway and scrape a relatively uniform roadbed, despite the thick mud. The equipment was loud, smoky, and relatively stationary. Each dozer was an ideal target for enemy artillery. During a German artillery attack, some men in the road-building crew dove for cover. Others opted to stand upright, against a tree trunk, and hope they became a smaller target for the relentless tree bursts several yards above their heads.

  The main supply road began to take shape, as gravel was dumped into the mud and compressed and then wood planks laid down. If the roadbed was still deemed unstable, tree trunks were laid end to end on both sides of the road. Then hundreds of logs were laid crosswise, side by side on top. The third layer was tree trunks again laid end to end on both sides of the new road. They were secured with six-inch posts pounded into the ground every thirteen feet. The wood rails helped keep vehicles from sliding off the makeshift road. Mud and brush were packed in between the parallel rails to marginally smooth the crosswise tree-trunk road surface. It required hundreds of tree trunks six to eighteen inches in diameter to build a road of any significant distance. Given the rippled surface of the road from the side-by-side logs, they were called corduroy roads.

  Much of the work took place at night and in the rain, when combat troops rested and there was less vehicular traffic. Some engineer squads patrolled just-built stretches of road to clear them of trees uprooted by enemy artillery.

  Another way to reach the 1/141 immediately was to fire specialized 105mm and 155mm artillery shells (designed to carry propaganda materials) into the surrounded battalion’s position. Shells would be filled with vitamin-enriched D rations, sulfadiazine tablets for the wounded, and Halazone purification tablets. Although the shells would not explode into a torrent of deadly shrapnel, they had to land close enough for Higgins’s men to retrieve them, but so not close as to score direct hits on the 1/141’s foxholes. Assuming no one was killed by this friendly fire, the capacity of the shells greatly limited the amount of supplies that could be delivered to more than two hundred men.

  A third option was to drop supplies in auxiliary tanks equipped with parachutes from aircraft flying through the rain just above the treetops. Utilized earlier in the war with mixed results, certainly the tanks’ larger size could deliver significantly more supplies than those delivered by artillery shells. But it would require twelve hours to ready the aircraft with the requested supply list, the specific drop location, and the estimated time for the drop. Additionally, as the aircraft approached the 1/141’s position, the pilots would have to fly below the clouds, evade German fire, and have only a few seconds to spot the markers laid out by Higgins’s men in the forest. Once the tanks were released, they would help the Germans determine Higgins’s position.b

  Higgins was told to expect an airdrop at 0800 the following morning, even though the forecast called for another day of low clouds and heavy mist. The pilots were told to be on call and that the go–no go decision would be made at the last minute. If the weather and enemy allowed the flight to proceed, Higgins could expect two days’ supply of K rations and water, medical supplies, one case of .45 ammunition, one case of carbine ammunition, two cases of machine-gun ammunition, four cases of M1 rifle ammunition, twelve batteries for Higgins’s radiomen, and a handful of field telephones. Of course, friendly artillery fire would have to be suspended minutes before the supply aircraft reached the 1/141.

  Dahlquist, however, wasn’t ready to give up on the day’s rescue. If the 141st and the 2/442 couldn’t break through in the late afternoon, once again he wanted Higgins and his cabal of young lieutenants to mount their own attack. As night fell he ordered Lundquist to have Higgins move “out in open ground across to Biffontaine.” Lundquist knew better. “This plan has already been discussed but don’t believe it is good due to litter cases,” Lundquist radioed Dahlquist. The general answered with a vague order: “I do not order you to leave wounded but the battalion must be gotten out tonight.”14

  Lundquist was standing in the radio cross fire between Dahlquist and Higgins. His superior officer expected a rescue by Lundquist’s battalions and the 2/442 within a few hours, but the rescue units had taken horrific casualties and were dug in for the night. Higgins was telling Lundquist his men were starving, increasing numbers lay wounded, and his ammunition was dwindling. Higgins also pointed out that he had about half as many combat effectives after sending out his forty-eight-man patrol at least fifteen hours earlier. And now Dahlquist wanted Higgins to mount a dash off the ridge and down the slope to Biffontaine? At night?

  As Dahlquist’s order was never implemented and no one could predict when relief units would reach the surrounded battalion, resupply by air became the top priority. At 2010 Blonder relayed a message to Lundquist, telling him the stranded soldiers would construct a white arrow (using paper maps and all the light-c
olored cloth the troops could muster) in a clearing near the stranded men. When the supply aircraft approached, they would release yellow smoke, if possible. Blonder’s message made it clear how risky the air-supply mission would be to the surrounded men. “Request rations, ammo, [unintelligible], medical supplies so that enemy will not observe and inform enemy of our position.” Although the 1/141 was pinned down in a confined area, apparently the exact deployment of the soldiers wasn’t readily discernible to the Germans. Blonder also asked, “Have you heard from our [breakout] patrol?” Lundquist had not. All he could do now was oversee the details of the airdrop, now scheduled for late morning the following day.15

  COMPANY I RIFLEMAN LAWRENCE ISHIKAWA DIDN’T GET TO FINISH his hand of poker after supper in his temporary Bruyères barrack. He had showered for the first time in days and then enjoyed a tray full of hot food. He and others had received new gear and clothing, including underwear, socks, wool trousers, field shirts, and a jacket, although their winter gear had not yet arrived. Shaving for the first time in nine days was a treat that had capped off the first day of much-needed recuperation. Ishikawa had survived continual combat for more than a week and had seen dozens of men wounded or killed. Now Company I was standing down for several days’ rest before going back onto the line. But shortly before midnight, the prospect of rest and recuperation disappeared. Ishikawa and his buddies were told that in a few hours, Company I would be reengaging the enemy. They would have less than one night’s good sleep before predawn assembly. Platoon sergeants reported to company commanders to get the lowdown.

  “Okay, get ready because you’re going back on line.” Not far from Ishikawa, Company K radioman Jim Tazoi didn’t believe what he had heard. Less than two days earlier, the bloodied men of the 3/442 had been granted rest and recuperation following the Bruyères and Biffontaine assaults. My gosh, he thought to himself, you said we were going to be in the rest area for two or three days. But here you’ve kicked us out already, telling us to go back on line.16

  Not only would the 3rd Battalion jump off before dawn the following day, but the 100th Battalion would also be alongside. Al Taka hashi had taken a precious shower, put on clean clothes, and shaved for the first time in more than a week. “So we shaved and that night that damn stupid general, he got his battalion lost . . . and he says ‘Hey, we have to go rescue them,’” he recalled.17 Takahashi and others were flabbergasted that Dahlquist wasn’t calling on other regiments in the 36th Division to launch a rescue mission. Yet Takahashi and the others likely didn’t know that the other two battalions of the 141st had failed for two days to reach Higgins’s men.

  Sleep was impossible for much of the 442nd’s 100th and 3rd Battalions that night. At 0300 on October 27, company officers and platoon leaders rousted their men and ordered them to gather their cold and damp gear at about the same time. The 442nd would attack the enemy at 1000. The 100th and 3rd Battalions had to be on the front line well in advance of that, and they faced a long, brutal climb up into the mountains immediately after leaving their temporary barracks.

  When the remainder of the 442nd attacked at midmorning, it would have the option of asking for full support from the 141st. If that circumstance developed, the 141st would make a frontal assault if the 442nd believed it could flank the enemy. The infantry would be accompanied by forward observers from the 131st Field Artillery and 522nd Field Artillery Battalions.

  MEANWHILE, A GROUP OF PILOTS WAS CALLED INTO A QUONSET hut at an American air base near Dole, about one hundred miles away. They were part of the 405th Fighter Squadron, 371st Fighter Group, 70th Air Wing, U.S. Ninth Air Force. Eliel Archilla, John Leonard, Paul Tetrick, Robert Booth, Milton Seale, Robert Dixon, Robert Gamble, Arthur Holderness, and Leon Hopper were among them. Some had been with the fighter group when it was one of the first squadrons to fly into Europe during the Normandy invasion on reconnaissance missions.

  They were told a battalion of soldiers from Texas was surrounded in the mountains to the north. They were stranded on a single ridge in a twenty-eight-hundred-square-mile forest spanning ninety miles from Strasbourg to the north, nearly to the Swiss border. They had run out of food and needed resupply by air, delivered over enemy territory. The briefing officer asked for volunteers. Everyone raised his hand. None had flown a resupply mission before.

  They knew the weather was bad and that the cloud ceiling was at only two hundred feet. They would have to fly nearly at treetop level. Most thought their chances of success were only about fifty-fifty. But before they could fly their risky mission, a lot of work had to be completed. Ground crews initially thought they could attach canvas bags to the underside of aircraft wings that could be released over Higgins’s position. But the bags ripped apart on practice takeoffs. They’d have to use auxiliary fuel tanks. The crews worked through the night, cutting small access doors in the tanks so they could be filled with supplies. They would be ready when the weather cleared in the morning.

  The plan of the mission was straightforward. Leonard, Tetrick, Booth, and Seale would make the first drop attempt, designated “Flight Green.” They would be looking “below the deck” (under the cloud cover) and peering through a dense forest to spot the arrow. Normally, they flew their four aircraft single file. But on this mission they would fly in pairs on the last leg of the mission, wingtip nearly to wingtip, to create a wider search area when they approached the reported location of the surrounded men. Archilla and the others would fly on a subsequent resupply mission.

  John Leonard would take the lead on the first attempt. The son of an army colonel, he had attended various schools in Massachusetts, Idaho, Minnesota, and Florida before graduating West Point in 1942. For nearly two years, he had been flying as a bomber escort over France and Holland. Others in the rescue flight had less experience. Robert Booth had arrived in Europe in late 1943. He had always been fascinated with flying. After high school he delivered milk to help support his family and then volunteered for the army air corps in 1942. During training he flew over his nearby hometown and buzzed the house where his girlfriend’s mother lived. He had a little more than a year’s combat flight experience when he volunteered for the mercy mission.

  The mission’s aircraft was to be the P-47D Thunderbolt. Nicknamed “the Jug,” the Thunderbolt was a stout fighter, designed for “dive-and-attack” tactics. It could reach a speed of 550 miles per hour in a dive. Its eight heavy machine guns across a forty-foot wingspan were deadly against the enemy’s infantry. Each plane would be rigged with two 150-gallon wing tanks filled with supplies. Crude ten-inch-square cargo-loading doors had been cut into each one. The pilots would have to fly low to spot Higgins’s arrow, form up at a higher altitude, and then drop the tanks rigged with parachutes through the clouds. The mission plan appeared as dangerous as it looked improbable.

  LUNDQUIST’S WRITTEN SUMMARY OF THE STATE OF AFFAIRS AT midnight on October 26 was as bleak as the constant rain and fog that had draped the rescue mission. “Combat efficiency: poor. Limited by combat fatigue, weather and terrain difficulties and approximately a 50% reduction in rifle company strength on position.” He couldn’t tell that to Higgins, however. He sent a very different message to him in the final radio transmission that night: “Strong friendly force coming.”18

  This time it would be the entire 442nd leading the way. Its soldiers had received the ammunition, equipment, and some of the rest they desperately needed.

  a While locations on the battlefield were generally numerical coordinates, a few in this battle were designed as “points,” such as Point 8, Point 9, or Point 30.

  b Contemporary accounts in 1944 described the parachutes as red and yellow. French residents recall seeing white parachutes attached to the tanks. They say the parachutes were only about twenty inches in diameter.

  CHAPTER 4

  COMBAT EFFICIENCY: POOR

  THE PATH LOOKED FAMILIAR TO ARTHUR CUNNINGHAM AS HE approached Higgins’s position early on October 27. He and five others had sneaked through t
he forest for hours after a long, cold night. Somehow they had avoided the German troops who surrounded the 1/141 and then got the American lookouts’ attention before entering Higgins’s perimeter. They were exhausted. Their report, sobering. The attempt to flank the Germans and attack the roadblock from the front had failed. “Five men from combat patrol returned with one prisoner. Remaining men of patrol captured in ambush,” Higgins forwarded to headquarters.1

  There no longer was any hope that the 1/141 could break out on its own. Its fighting force had been substantially weakened by the loss of more than forty men. Higgins didn’t know exactly how many had been captured, how many were wounded or left for dead, sprawled across boulders and downed tree trunks. Regimental headquarters now knew Higgins was down to about two hundred combat troops, after accounting for the wounded and killed over the past four days.

  A country boy from Virginia, Arthur Cunningham had carried a heavy automatic rifle and pockets full of ammunition on the ill-fated breakout patrol. A year earlier he had been hunting rabbit, squirrel, and quail near the north fork of the Holston River in western Virginia. Part Cherokee, he had quit school in the ninth grade and worked on the family farm, raising tobacco, corn, and vegetables that were canned for the winter. He fished the Holston with a cane pole or slammed a sixteen-pound sledgehammer onto rocks to stun fish to the surface. Anything to help feed the family.

  More than twenty-four hours earlier, he and his patrol had advanced slowly down the ridge in a southwesterly direction away from Higgins’s position, knowing the forest was filled with Germans. The path funneled the patrol into the heart of the enemy’s position opposite a minefield. As the patrol entered an open area near the foot of the ridge, a mine exploded and the Germans opened deafening fire. Some men fell dead; others dove for cover. It was hopeless. The firing ceased when an American raised something white, perhaps a map or piece of fabric. A white flag. Most of Higgins’s patrol gave up. Not Cunningham. “I went crawlin’ on up the mountainside and there was a big old high rock and an old pine tree growed up by it. I went on up ’round the mountainside and I heard somethin’ come thrashin’ through the woods behind me. So I got up into an old pine and hid, to where I could look out. And it was four other Americans. We started back. . . . I could hear someone a-walkin’ and when [a German] walked up, I dropped my Browning [rifle] down on his side and he throwed his hands up.”2