American Valor Quarterly Issue 12 - Spring 2015 | Page 35

U.S. Army Signal Corps

pushed another army back 200 miles to
break a siege. That allowed us to take
the dead and wounded out, and bring
supplies back into the battlefield. When
we left, a lot of guys didn’t have rifles
and if you had three boxes of K rations,
you were lucky. One unit found some
ammunition and as you walked by, you
picked up whatever you could. When
we went to front, we saw guys coming
back all disoriented from what they had
seen.
While we were there, the rain
quit, but snow came and brought
temperatures down as low as 15 below
zero. We weren’t dressed for it and they
couldn’t do anything for us. When
supplies finally did come in, the first
thing we received was ammunition.
After they got some relief, and Gen.
Patton’s troops came in, they started
getting us overcoats. But by that
time, I think most people’s feet were
frozen, and your hands were frozen,
too. Your whole body was in the first
stages of shutting down. You know
when you’re so cold you shiver to keep
warm? We had so little food, there was
nothing to give us the energy and we
quit shivering. We were in bad shape
and the doctors didn’t know how we
survived. In those 10 days, I had three
boxes of K rations. That amount was
supposed to last for one day, but I had
to make it last for 10. I remember my
Christmas dinner was snow and lemon
power. The 101st airborne staff was
a little luckier. Some guys scrounged
around a building that was bombed in
Bastogne and found some sardines and
crackers. That’s what the generals ate.
But that’s something I grew to really
appreciate about the airborne units. The
top officers, even up to the generals,
suffered with you. That’s one of the
reasons we had a great deal of respect
for our officers and there is a familiarity
between officers and enlisted men in
an airborne unit that you don’t see in a
lot of other ground units, where they’re
more rigid about that kind of thing. In
our unit, there were lines you didn’t
cross out of respect to your officer, but
still, he was in the foxhole next to you
SPRING 2015

and suffered with you.

prevail. No matter what.

The operation was successful but
we lost thousands of men up there,
either killed or wounded. At one
point, Germans came in and asked
for our surrender. Our response was
that we’d kill every goddamn German
soldier who tried to get in here. The
German officer said, “We’ll kill many
Americans,” to which our officer
replied, “Well, get on your way and
good luck.” They gave us two hours
to think over our decision or they
were going to annihilate us. So we all
sat around waiting for this to happen

The next operation was through
Berchtesgaden. It was widely felt that
the Germans were going to hole up
there in the final days of the war. They
had built fortresses underground, with
food, generators, everything. There was
talk about the Germans staging a final )