Capture and casualty

Meanwhile, an important battle had been fought at Mons, where the VII Corps ran into the elements of 20 German divisions that British troops had flushed from the Normandy beachhead and the Pas de Calais. The VII Corps took 30,000 prisoners and killed 2,000 Germans—part of the last reserves of the German 7^th and 15^th Armies. This left the roads through Belgium virtually unblocked all the way to the German border and enabled the American 1^st Army to take Aachen within six weeks.

Jack catches a train for Paris and a much
needed furlough in Verviers, Belgium.

Jack made a capture during this time as well and probably saved the lives of the German prisoners in the process. “Townspeople nearby had told us there were some German soldiers hiding in the hills and woods outside of town, so we went looking for them,” Jack says. “The guys I was with were looking in a stone house, shooting the doors off rooms with their machine guns. I figured no one in their right mind would be in there, so I started back down the hill.

“In a grove of trees, I knelt down and looked up and saw a bunch of Germans hiding up there. We just stared at each other until one, a very tall, thin soldier said, ‘Ah, comrade!’ I replied, ‘Comrade!’ and he came down out of the trees, followed by the others. They were all young, some of them probably no more than 15 or 16 years old. They hadn’t been eating well and had boils on their faces.

I called to my buddies, ‘Hey, they’re down here,’ and one of the guys in my group came down and started cursing at them and acting like he was going to shoot them. ‘For God’s sake, calm down,' I said. 'They could’ve shot me if they wanted to and they didn’t. They’re just kids.’ When they realized we weren’t going to shoot them, a couple more came out of the bushes. One of them gave me his watch out of gratitude, I think, for saving his life. I also got to keep one of their pistols and sold it and the watch later to a soldier on one of the other gun crews.”

Jack on leave in Verviers, 
Belgium, at the Chicago Bar.

On the way to Germany, the unit experienced its first casualty since the invasion. 

The 474^th engaged the Luftwaffe in three raids and engaged four planes, downing one of them, during this time. Battery A moved to Theux and a few days later joined the rest of the outfit as they convoyed to Eupen. It was near Theux that A Battery’s John P. Cairo was shot in the stomach. As they carried him away he said, “Don’t worry fellows, I’ll be back later.” But a few hours later, word was received that he died in a field hospital.³²

Jack knew John well, and although it doesn’t say so in The Maverick Outfit, John was killed in a gun accident by another member of his gun crew. “The other soldier was adjusting the headspace in a 50-caliber gun,” Jack explains. “If you get it too tight, it will fire automatically, and that’s what happened. John had just eaten breakfast and was going out to check on how the other guys in his crew were doing. The gun barrel was depressed, which it shouldn’t have been, when it fired and it blew John's stomach and its contents out his back.

“John and I were good friends,” Jack continues. “When he was on our gun crew, he and I usually dug our foxhole together. We would have lots of friendly discussions and only a few loud ones. He was raised near Altoona, PA.

John was buried in a temporary cemetery at Fosses-la-Ville, Belgium, as were 2,198 other American soldiers from September 1944 through May 1945. His temporary interment there became, decades later, the basis of a long-distance friendship. Follow the link to read more about Fosses on a supplemental page to this blog, "Belgium Connection."

Cpl. John P. Cairo

“About nine or 10 years after I got home, I went to look up John's family," Jack said. "His only remaining relative was a stepsister. Needless to say, she was very happy I came to visit her, and we both cried. No one else from the unit had ever written to or visited the family. But she knew how John had been killed through a friend of hers who had worked in the Pentagon. I promised to send her some pictures of John and me, taken in the states, and I did," which explains why there were no pictures of John in Jack's photo collection. The photo of John shown here was found on his Fosse #1 virtual cemetery profile.

Jack adds that John and he discusssed prior to the invasion about whether they would go home again or not. “I always felt I would,” Jack says, “but John didn’t think he’d make it.”

Around the time of John's death, Jack and some members of his unit became friendly with an Army mess unit made up of African-American soldiers, who were interested in the guns Jack's group used. He and some of the other guys would go down later to eat and sit and talk with the cooks as they ate. “One member of our gun crew asked me to bring him back some chow, that where he came from they didn’t eat meals with blacks,” Jack recalls. “He was from Pennsylvania, same as me, so I called him on it and told him to get his own food or go hungry. The sergeant brought him back something anyway.”