Honor Before Glory Page 11

  Cunningham and four others had escaped the ambush. The six men, including the German prisoner, had hidden under a rocky ledge most of the day and endured an American artillery barrage most of the night. They never introduced themselves to each other. When they reached the 1/141, Cunningham reported to Higgins. “Captain, I brought you a prisoner.” “He ain’t no prisoner of mine, he’s yours,” said Higgins. “You take him and take care of him.”3

  The prisoner told Higgins there were about 150 Germans in the area where Higgins knew the thrust of the rescue mission was directed. Higgins told Blonder to forward that intelligence to regimental command. Meanwhile, Cunningham, Kripisch, Private Robert Camaiani, Private Tillman Warren, and Private Burt McQueen returned to their foxholes. The German prisoner became Cunningham’s unwelcome foxhole buddy.

  A single patrol had cost Higgins nearly 50 men. At least 10 of them had arrived as replacements on October 18. They had barely enough time to report to their units and collect their gear before heading out on the doomed mission. Now, with only a few days’ combat experience, the wounded American prisoners were being taken to a German aid station. The others were on their way to a prison camp near Moosburg, in southern Bavaria. Several were shot by a German sergeant on the way, Private Joe Hilty of Company A recalled after the war. It’s not known exactly how many of Higgins’s men reached Stalag VII-A alive.

  LIEUTENANT COLONELS GORDON SINGLES AND ALFRED PURSALL were fiercely loyal to their men. They were about to lead the 100th and 3rd Battalions, respectively, back into battle, where the enemy held every advantage. Singles had taken command of the 100th at Camp Shelby. The third-generation West Point graduate had no combat experience until Italy. Wavy hair and a fresh face gave him a youthful appearance that perhaps led him to rely heavily on his officers. He encouraged their input and developed close and informal relationships with several. He had relied on Young Oak Kim almost as a chief of staff. Kim’s loss a few days earlier had been devastating. The 100th’s mounting casualties weighed heavily on the thirty-eight-year-old Philadelphia native, who was married and had a ten-year-old son.

  On the day before his thirty-ninth birthday that morning, Pursall towered above his men. Most soldiers estimated him to be at least six feet five, with shoulders to match. The opposite of Singles, Pursall’s wireless glasses and size gave him the appearance of an older stern schoolteacher. But he looked down on his men only figuratively. The Missouri native’s command style was similar to Singles’s, often asking battalion headquarters’ enlisted men, like messenger Rudy Tokiwa and radioman Ernest Uno, for their opinions. That approach had stunned them when he had taken command in Italy a few months earlier.

  Oh my God, they’re sending us a gray-haired old man. What in the hell’s he gonna do for us? Tokiwa first thought. But when Pursall nearly beat Tokiwa into a foxhole during an enemy artillery attack in Italy, Tokiwa began to change his mind.

  “I hear they call you ‘Punch Drunk,’” Pursall had said to Tokiwa by way of introduction.

  “Yeah, I guess they do.”

  “But they tell me you’re the smartest man in the group.”

  “No, I’m the dumbest one. I wouldn’t be here if I was smart.”

  “Well, show me how to be dumb. Let’s go up there [to the front].”4

  Pursall was as fearless as he was unflappable. On one occasion, he and Uno were moving toward the fighting when one of them tripped a land mine. They had no time to even hold their breath as the mine flew up into the air, and they heard pak before it fell to the ground. A dud.

  The fearless Pursall laughed. “Boy we got a narrow one there,” he said, before continuing his advance. “That’s the kind of guy he was. Fearless,” Uno recalled later.5

  Before dawn the 100th and 3rd Battalions began their climb into the forest and into clouds that nearly touched the ground. Visibility ended at the man in front or alongside. Only the muted rustle of canvas revealed their presence as they walked, two battalions abreast. They had six hours to get up onto the ridge and then advance nearly two miles to be in place to attack later in the morning. Tension mounted as they neared the Germans.

  On the far left, the 2nd was up ahead, but not far, given the previous day’s brutal fighting with the Germans. The 100th would advance on the right, along the southern side of the ridge. The 3rd was in the center, with Companies I and K at the point, atop the narrow ridge. The battalions’ route of advance was in a southeasterly direction toward the 1/141. It would concentrate some units into strings of ants on paths along the sole logging road, making them obvious and predictable targets. Others would have to fight their way through the forest, a tree at a time.

  Company I’s Hajiro, Ishikawa, Sakumoto, and others looked to the only man in the battalion taller than Pursall, their company commander, Captain Joseph Byrne. He was another Caucasian officer they deeply respected, in part because he took a personal interest in his men. When he had been assigned to a post in Hawaii, he learned how to pronounce Japanese names. Technical Sergeant Jim Yamashita marveled at how Byrne could hear a new Japanese name once and always pronounce it correctly thereafter. Everyone else seemed to place the accent on the wrong syllable. Few Caucasian officers extended such common courtesies. Yamashita, once a popular student who was student body president when growing up in a Mormon community, appreciated Byrne’s respect for the Japanese Americans under this command.

  Byrne had sold furniture after graduating high school in Elmira, New York. He was inducted into the army in 1940. He had been assigned to the 442nd after graduating officer candidate school. When Company I entered combat for the first time in Italy, the troops had been flabbergasted by this tall, lanky Caucasian officer fighting alongside them, crouching behind the same boulders, shouting orders, and advancing shoulder-to-shoulder.

  As the hour of attack approached, the forest surrounding the 2nd and 3rd Battalions shuddered when the planned artillery attack began, pinning them in place. Every fifteen seconds an artillery shell exploded in the tree canopy or slammed into the damp ground. The command post to the west, a farmhouse shared by the 442nd and 141st, took enemy fire as well. It was American artillery fire, falling short of its target—not an uncommon occurrence in combat. The ability to target the enemy from two miles away, without being able to see the target in foul weather, was as much art as it was science.

  As word reached the batteries to cease fire, General John Dahlquist arrived at the command post for a situation report. All three 442nd battalions were committed to the mission, and all available tanks in the sector were assigned in support of the 442nd. The success of the relief mission would be entirely up to the 442nd. The remaining battalions of the 141st would remain in place and be ready to attack, just in case they were needed.

  At 1053 the assault began. The Germans fired back almost immediately. Men fell wounded. Nearby buddies yelled for medics such as Jim Okubo to save them.

  When he volunteered for the military, Company K radioman Jim Tazoi’s mother had told him, “Die if you need to, because you’re going to war, but do not bring shame to your country or your family.”6 He had been raised on a family farm and was an excellent baseball player. He had left Utah State University in his sophomore year to enlist in the army. Five months’ fighting had taught him to trust his instincts, day after day.

  At one point when he approached a small gully,

  I just happened to look down and there in that trench was a German soldier. He looked right at me and—I don’t know if he had a gun or not—maybe ten seconds before that he could have been firing at us. But he was hoping that I wouldn’t notice him, but when I looked down and saw him, I raised my gun and he let out a squeal that I still remember. I had presence of mind enough that I didn’t want to shoot him in the face so I put about four or five rounds into his chest hoping that I could kill him right away.7

  Down on the side of the ridge where the 100th slowly advanced, the instincts of another farm boy, Al Takahashi, were equally sharp. He had grown up in cen
tral California and tried to join the air corps but was rejected, so he volunteered for the army. As he trained for combat, his family was given two weeks’ notice to liquidate their leased farm before internment. As a replacement in the 100th going into France, battle had hardened him in the previous two weeks.

  When you see an enemy, you fire. And then it became just like when you were a kid. You’re playing cowboys and Indians, you’re shooting. Well, it just got to the point where you got to shoot first before they shoot you. . . . You don’t even think about anything else, just get him.8

  AS WEAPONS FIRE FILLED THE WOODS AND THE RESCUE BATTALIONS’ advance quickly slowed, others looked up into the mist and listened hard for the hint of an aircraft’s engine. At 1050 Higgins radioed the command post, asking when he could expect the airdrop. The reply was succinct and vague: “Not yet.”

  Not far away, unrelenting light rain over the past twelve hours had soaked the twenty-five-foot arrow lying on the forest floor. Various men had contributed what they could to cobble together the makeshift beacon for the morning’s airdrop. Each had decided what was critical to his ability to fight the Germans and what might make the difference in getting food, ammunition, and medical supplies for those lying on litters, their wounds stiffening in the cold. Despite the bone-chilling cold, parka liners helped make their arrow. T-shirts had been torn into strips, not missed by soldiers already sore from the cold.

  AT DAWN ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH, THE NEWS HAD BEEN BAD. Nearly all of France was “socked in.” The 9th U.S. Air Force’s operations were grounded with one exception. The two scheduled resupply flights to the lost battalion, however, were told to proceed. Flight Green launched at 1045. Given the low altitude and mountainous terrain, the four aircraft flew the early part of the mission in a string, one behind each other, as they snaked through valleys, looked for checkpoints, and avoided enemy fire. They followed railroad tracks that ended at Biffontaine at the base of the ridge. Leonard had the lead, with Booth last in line.

  As they neared the Vosges foothills, flight leader Captain Gavin Robertson ordered the four to pull up through the overcast near Fougerolles and assemble in formation for the final leg to the target. Each pilot increased throttle, got his nose up, and disappeared into the clouds. As Higgins and his men listened for the approach of their airborne saviors, only three emerged from the clouds. Booth was missing. He didn’t answer radio calls. Leonard couldn’t wait.

  The remaining three continued to the point where they hoped to see Higgins’s arrow below. The plan was to approach as close to the ground as possible and then bank hard just as the tanks were released. In a sense, the pilots would try to skip the tanks into the forest, much like a flat rock on a pond. The tanks would approach at an angle until their parachutes caught air and slowed the tanks’ speed into a vertical descent.

  But the cloud cover was so thick they could see nothing as they circled, hoping for a break in the clouds. At 1115 it was obvious the mission would have to be scrubbed. Flight Green turned for home, its precious cargo still attached to its wings. They had been led to the target by an L-4 observation plane flown by Captain Mayhew Foster. He threw a few boxes of supplies out his door and down into the cloud cover before leaving the area.

  The three remaining Thunderbolt pilots dropped down through the clouds and again flew just above the trees on their way back to base. They flew so low that one of Leonard’s wings hit a tree and suffered moderate damage, but not enough to keep him from landing safely at Dole. About the time they landed, Higgins was told at noon the resupply mission had been a failure and that the aircraft had returned to base. It would return if there was a break in the clouds. Attached to the message was the standard assurance that a friendly force was heading Higgins’s way. It had been nearly seventy-two hours since the lost battalion had been cut off. Much-needed supplies were still at Dole.

  Without them, Higgins’s men would have to cope with their hunger, and some would suffer more with developing trench foot or infections. Radioman Blonder’s feet, in rancid, unchanged socks, no longer were just cold and stiff. Pain had replaced the stiffness. He could barely walk as trench foot took hold. The initial burning and swelling in his feet hadn’t seemed so bad. But then the pain intensified as the swelling increased and the bottom of the feet turned dark blue. If it got worse, the toes could begin to seep like a bad burn. The pain would become excruciating. More began to suffer the same initial pain in their feet, with no relief in sight.

  The wounded were in worse shape. A few bandages remained, but the painkiller supply had been exhausted. Blonder worried the enemy would hear the cries of men with seeping wounds. Meanwhile, Lundquist had authorized Higgins to begin burying his dead. Shallow graves were dug after a brief moment of hushed reflection. Their locations were recorded for the grave-registration units to someday retrieve the bodies.

  WHILE THE 1/141 HAD WAITED FOR THE AIRDROP, A GERMAN patrol accompanied by a tank probed the perimeter but had inflicted minimal damage. Higgins had arranged his men to maximize fields of crossing fire. The ranks of the wounded were mounting, but it appeared the Germans weren’t yet prepared to mount an all-out assault on the surrounded men. Only exploratory attacks from different directions had taken place so far. There may have been several reasons for that.

  Commanding officers of German battalions, regiments, and armies in the area were almost unanimously appalled at the quality and numbers of their troops. In most cases, the condition of their equipment was substandard, and many lacked critical supplies. The officers’ frustration was clearly evident in their written reports. When General Hermann Balck had taken command of Army Group G and assumed responsibility for much of the Vosges fighting, he was mortified at what he found at his disposal, given the führer’s demand that the Germans turn retreat into victory in the Vosges.

  “We urgently need mountain troops,” he wrote General Alfred Jodl. “Flatland troops are not suited to fight in the Vosges Mountains and are not properly equipped in comparison to the enemy’s mountain troops. . . . [T]he Nineteenth Army are [sic] pitiful in both materiel and personnel. Never before have I led such thrown-together and poorly trained troops.”9

  His plea for more men led to only an additional five thousand inadequately trained men in October. General Wiese would have to shuttle units between firefights in the Vosges because there were not enough men to establish a continuous line of defense. That placed a premium on communication across a fluid battlefield as crises and opportunities developed, such as surrounding a battalion of American soldiers. An undated entry in the Nineteenth Army’s log at the time revealed the limits of Wiese’s ability to wage war: “Communications between the various fighting units and command posts is problematic. Many of the incorrect or delayed messages can be explained by the difficulty that messengers encounter in the deep ravines of the wooded thickets. By the time a messenger reaches the command post, the situation at the front usually has already changed.”10

  Yet to the men of the 442nd, it seemed every ravine, ridge, and boulder concealed a German soldier. The Germans were waging a brutal, agonizing war of attrition that likely made their combat firepower seen greater than it was. The Germans’ objective was to inflict as many American casualties as possible, pause, perhaps fall back a few yards to new concealment, and force the Americans to continue climbing up into murderous fields of carbine, machine-gun, and artillery fire.

  The Germans’ strategy for Higgins’s situation was similar. The enemy infantry was regularly engaging the perimeter and then using artillery to pound the foxholes of those hunkered down. Yet the thick forest worked to Higgins’s advantage.a If the Americans couldn’t see the Germans, in turn the Germans couldn’t be sure of exactly how many men they had surrounded or precisely what firepower the 1/141 had at its disposal. A stalemate had developed, and it would remain until one commanding officer or the other risked the lives of his remaining men to force the issue.

  BY EARLY AFTERNOON, THE COMMANDS OF THE 442ND AND 141ST had c
onsolidated at a single command post on the ridge, about fifteen hundred yards from the fighting and more than two and a half miles from Higgins’s position. At 1315 Dahlquist arrived. Once again, the situation report on several fronts was not encouraging.

  Much like Higgins’s men, for four days a company in the 3/141 had been initially pinned down by a superior German force. Technical Sergeant Charles Coolidge’s men had held the Germans at bay as the situation developed into a standoff, but now German tanks approached Coolidge’s position. Coolidge refused a surrender offer from a German officer riding in a tank. A furious battle of grenades and weapons fire ensued. Coolidge and his men killed or wounded an estimated seventy-five Germans before they were forced to withdraw.b

  Dahlquist knew the air resupply mission for Higgins’s men had been scuttled. The 100th and 3/442 were to have launched a coordinated assault at 1000, but radio traffic indicated they had yet to make contact with each other after several hours of fighting. Some tanks were running low on fuel, and enemy resistance was proving difficult to predict. Minutes before Dahlquist arrived, one company of Germans had surrendered, while a few hundred yards away another unit was reported to be digging in to fight the Americans. A 442nd patrol reached one of the German roadblocks and discovered it was not in the location first reported. When such command confusion reigned, it fell to individual soldiers to rise to the occasion and to trust one another under fire.