Battle yet unsung : the fighting men of the 14th Armored Division in World War II

366 Pages·2011·3.29 MB·English

by  O'Keeffe

CONTENTS

A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION
1. FIRST DAYS OF BATTLE IN THE MARITIME ALPS
2. TRAGEDY AT BARR
3. OTTER-OFFENBACH: THE ONSLAUGHT
4. TASK FORCE HUDELSON AND OPERATON NORTHWIND
5. THE HATTEN-RITTERSHOFFEN INFERNO
6. OHLUNGEN FOREST: GETTING HURT AND GETTING EVEN
7. BREACHING THE SIEGFRIED LINE
8. THE DRIVE FROM THE RHINE
9. FROM COLLAPSE TO LIBERATION
10. FROM ATLANTIC TO PACIFIC?
APPENDIX: 14TH ARMORED DIVISION DATA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES
NOTES
This book is dedicated to the men of the 14th Armored Division who fought
valiantly in France and Germany during World War II. This work is especially
dedicated to those men who gave their lives or were seriously wounded in the
fighting. This last group experienced a lifetime of sacrificing their health and
wholeness.
It is also dedicated to the families of all of these men who went overseas,
families which had to worry and pray that a telegram from the War Department
was never delivered to their door.

Finally, this work is dedicated to two men, the late Sgt. and Dr. Robert Isaac
Davies, my brother-in-law, and to his Battalion Commander, Lt. Col. Bob E.
Edwards, who was an inspiration to all his men in the 68th Armored Infantry
Battalion of the 14th Armored. This book is about the men of all the combat
battalions in the Division, yet these dedications could go on to include the brave
soldiers who risked their lives for God and Country in all the battalions that
served in World War II in both the European and Pacific Theaters of
Operations.
A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION
It was in 1999 that I first met Robert Isaac Davies. Bob had grown up in a Welsh
community in Poultney, Vermont, a small town where slate mining in the local
quarries was the primary source of income for most families. Many grandparents
in the town, including Bob’s, had been raised speaking Welsh around the kitchen
table. He had spoken only Welsh until his first grade teacher sent a note home
indicating that students had to learn English. Bob Davies’ account of his
linguistic transformation recalled his grandfather’s announcing to his household,
“There’ll be no more Welsh spoken in this family.” Bob’s wife also
remembered, like other kids, speaking Welsh.
In the small elementary and high school classes in Poultney, the average
number of pupils was only twenty-five. Everybody knew everyone else, and the
sports teams had rosters, especially football, that named almost every boy in a
given class. Bob grew up an avid reader, thanks to some of his teachers, many of
whom he remembered with respect and affection. He also loved to play sports,
especially football, basketball, and baseball, the latter being the one he hoped to
pursue professionally as an adult. Instead, after he finished high school, he
entered the army in 1943 and shipped out from the train station in the nearby city
of Rutland. His life would change dramatically in the next several years.
It was decades later, in 1999, that I first met Bob, being about fifteen years
younger than him. At the time I was unattached, with four adult children miles
away from me. I, to use an old-fashioned word, was courting Marilyn Frances
Balducci, a younger sister of Olive (Jo) Davies, whose family was still
connected to Poultney. Bob and Jo had been married after World War II, when
Bob returned home from the European Theater of Operations (ETO). He had
stepped on a Schü mine in Alsace, France when he was a Sergeant of the 68th
Armored Infantry Battalion of the 14th Armored Division, then with Seventh
Army.
We all met at Bob and Jo’s condominium in Satellite Beach, Florida, where
Marilyn introduced me to the couple. As a retired English professor, I regarded it
as a signal privilege and great honor to get to know a wounded combat veteran,
and more so later to become his brother-in-law. I am one of the generation of the
famous military historian Stephen Ambrose, who, like me, grew up as a child
during World War II. I can still remember the drama in my living room listening
to our cathedral-shaped radio which announced the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor on December 7th, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy,” as President
Roosevelt phrased it.
Ambrose would go on in his professional life to produce several excellent
books on the fighting in Europe, and what he said of the combat veterans of the
war, both British and American, typifies my feelings and those of most of my
contemporaries: “It has been a memorable experience for me. I was ten years old
when World War II ended. Like many other men my age, I have always admired
—nay, stood in awe of—the G.I.’s. I thought that what they had done was
beyond praise. I still do.”
When I was a kid, a few years younger, I was entranced by action scenes in
films, of which there were many about World War II in the decades after the
fighting. Living vicariously through someone else’s heroism filled my thoughts
and dreams as it did thousands of other young boys. This glorious and harmless
view influenced our vision of war years and even decades later.
However, as happened to countless other families, the tragedy of war struck
home as well. Sometime in May of 1944, my mother, father, brother Dave and I
were returning home from seeing a movie. When we entered the hall of our
home, there was a telegram on the small table with the lace doily in the hall. It
informed my mother, considered next of kin, that my Uncle John, her kid
brother, was dead. He had been an artilleryman with a National Guard Division
and had spent two years in the hellhole of New Guinea fighting the Japanese.
John, we were informed, had died of a combination of malaria, typhoid fever,
and pneumonia. I was later to discover that at least half of the deaths of soldiers
in places like New Guinea were caused not by some noble flesh wound in the
tradition of Homer’s Iliad but by invisible bacteria. Some time later a Purple
Heart Badge was mailed to my mother, but it could not undo the broken heart
that she suffered. Such experiences were commonplace for mothers and wives
across the country, a theme dramatized in the recent documentary The War by
Ken Bums.
In my uncle’s case, the grim irony was that he hadn’t had to serve in the
Armed Forces. He, like all his sisters and brothers (six in all) was an immigrant
from Ireland and was, like his father and one other brother, a carpenter, living in
Brooklyn and patiently awaiting his US citizenship. His death, in another sense,
was not ironic at all. The pattern had been set years, decades, and even a
millennium earlier. Both my father’s side of the family, the O’Keeffes, and my
mother’s side, the O’Sullivans, had participated in combat as early as the Danish
invasion of Ireland in the tenth century.
The fondness of the Irish for keeping historical (sometimes mythologized)
track of its people produced ample documentation of their sometimes violent
record. Only a few years ago during a trip to that country did I discover from a
cousin that the Cork City Museum had a display of explosives employed by my
father to blow a bridge in 1921 to interdict a unit of British Auxiliaries, the
notorious “Black and Tans.” Although in daylight hours a country blacksmith, at
night he fought with the Irish Republican Army to end English domination of his
country. After the end of fighting, he left his country for the United States,
refusing ever to return to a land that had seen so much pain and suffering.
Ironically, only a few years earlier, my mother’s oldest brother, James
O’Sullivan, had had his jaw shattered by a shell at the famous and painful World
War I battle at Gallipoli, a campaign that failed terribly. Sadly, the pattern
continued not only with my Uncle John in New Guinea but also with my cousin
Mickey O’Sullivan, who disappeared when a mortar shell landed in his foxhole
in Korea.
On my father’s side, his brother Jack, who had emigrated to the United States
years before my father, had, with his wife Alice, as many as nine children. Four
of them, including a daughter, served in World War II; she a WAC and the rest
in the Army. One served with Patton’s Third Army, to which Bob Davies’ 14th
Armored Division was attached in the spring of 1945. Miraculously, they all
survived without a serious wound or being killed in action. The prayers of their
parents had clearly been answered.
My life as a child and as a teenager seemed to be saturated with images of
combat and wounding, both victory and defeat. I found it everywhere, or perhaps
it found me. At age twelve or thirteen, as a conscientious altar boy, I met the real
thing, a combat wounded veteran, but in a strange kind of appearance or
apparition. This last word is not hyperbolic, for there came to our church a
Father Matthew Taggart. My parish was used by the Archdiocese as a kind of
rest home for recuperating priests, some physically, some psychologically
unwell. Father Taggart, a very tall, thin, and sickly man, was assigned to St.
Frances. In contrast to the pastor and the other priests, he was very interested in
children, boys especially, in a healthy way. For the first time, he organized a
boy’s basketball program, and the altar boys and others responded
enthusiastically. He made sure that we had decent basketballs and coached us.
We thought the millennium had arrived. We didn’t need trumpeting angels, just
some court time.
Alas, it was not to continue, for Father Taggart had been seriously wounded
in France in the last year of the war. He never mentioned that fact, but the story
got around. In my own febrile mind, I didn’t know how to react. I served on the
altar with him, struck by his genuine piety and serious dignity. It was a privilege
for me. And then he was no more. Taken to the hospital, he died shortly
afterward. I was shocked with surprise and grief. How could this happen? Why
would God allow this?
But the denouement to the drama would come. Only a day later, the rectory
announced that the radio (no TV involved then) was going to broadcast a
dramatization of the action in which he was terribly wounded. All the radios
must have been on in our community to hear the brief drama. The voices and the
sounds of battle revealed the desperate situation in which Chaplain Taggart
found himself on the fields of France in 1944 or 1945.
The American advance was suddenly stopped by the Germans, and infantry
units had to retreat. Left in what was now a no-man’s land was a barn full of
wounded GI’s. Evidently the medics must have been driven out. A decision had
been made that fighting through to them was impossible, and so they would
become prisoners of war. At that point, Chaplain Taggart volunteered to work
his way back to the barn and bring out at least the walking wounded. He did so
but in the process became seriously wounded himself.
The funeral took place a day or so after the radio broadcast. I had been
chosen to serve as first altar boy, responsible for, among other things, carrying
the heavy poled crucifix both in the church and at the cemetery where he was to
be buried. This was the same cemetery where my Uncle John was buried and
later my parents. There was heavy emotional weight on my shoulders. By the
time the firing squad had fired a volley and the American flag had been folded
into its customary triangle, I was awash in tears. I would never forget that day.
And so it was no wonder that I was thrilled to meet Bob Davies in Satellite
Beach. I brought with me a new edition of the famous World War II cartoons of
Bill Mauldin, which were a favorite of GIs like Bob. We both laughed over the
picture of the seedy GI with the unmilitary growth of beard, shielding his eyes as
he prepares to fire his Colt .45 pistol into the chassis of his old, reliable
warhorse–his jeep. For Bob, memories lingered of a favorite GI war
correspondent, Ernie Pyle, who chronicled the war in Italy. He made the mistake
of moving over to the war in the Pacific to cover the fighting there, and was
killed by a Japanese sniper or machine gunner. Bob and I immediately warmed
to each other: we both had Celtic family backgrounds, both had retired as
professional people after educating ourselves out of the working class, and both
shared an abiding interest in the war in Europe. But we were looking at it from
different ends of the telescope, he as a wounded participant and I as a cousin and
nephew of several participants of Bob’s age.
Over the years, as we got to know each other better, we shared other interests
such as carpentry and house building. I was mostly a listener, for Bob Davies
had the most inexhaustible fund of stories of anyone I had ever met. And he was
very funny both narrating yarns and doing imitations of characters he had
known. True to form, though, I was very attentive to those stories growing out of
Bob’s wartime experiences. Some stories pertained to the life that Bob and Jo
had after he returned home suffering from the loss of his leg. Evidently, as might
be imagined, he had to adjust himself psychologically to his wound and to the
realization that his dream of playing professional sports was over. The transition
had not been easy, but instead he employed the benefits of the GI Bill to put
himself through medical school. He became a successful radiologist, and his
charm and warmth made him outstanding with nervous and wary patients.
During the summers my wife Marilyn and I spent our days at the log home I
had built in the southwestern corner of Massachusetts, in the foothills of the
Berkshires. This location was about a three-hour drive to Lake St. Catherine,