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| Jack and members of his gun crew took turns posing in this abandoned German airplane shot down outside of Duren. |
The weather changed to coincide with the atmosphere. Instead of happy sunlight, the troops now faced rain, mist and dreariness as they convoyed through Kettinis, Eynatten, Lichtenbush, Oberforstbach, Kornelmunster and along the pillboxes and tooth-like concrete tank traps of the Siegfried Line border defenses. Although still near Walheim, A Battery’s specific assignment was to guard supply routes at Schmidthof.
The batteries pulled off the highways and into the dark and dreary Hurtgen Forest to take up their assignments. It was like going from daylight into a darkened church. Some of the chow wagons reduced service to two meals a day because there wasn’t enough daylight to do more. The darkness set in late in the afternoon, and the nights were long and pitch black. Not even starlight could penetrate the dense canopy of trees.
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| Jack with Frank Geesey (left), who alerted him to the land mine he'd very nearly stepped on. |
“I had only gone a very short distance when the fellow in back of me yelled, ‘Did you see what you almost stepped on?’ I stopped, looked on the ground in back of me and noticed part of a mine that had been exposed by prior shell bursts. My footprints were on each side of it.
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| On the back of this photo taken near Duren, Jack wrote, "The walls are still standing on this one. Lucky people who live here!" |
But the ack-ack units had it a lot easier than those in the infantry, as Jack and others are quick to point out.
At Venwegen, we watched truck convoys go in each morning with the replacements for the 1st Division, already badly chewed up in Aachen, and now deep in the forest fight. At noon, the same trucks came out with the bodies for burial. The ambulances went all the time. It was enough to make three men in one of our crews withdraw their applications for transfer to a more active unit.33
After two weeks of foul weather, the Allied forces mounted an offensive that included efforts by the 1st Army to take Duren. The attack began at noon, Nov. 16, with 1,200 8th Air Force bombers flying in tight formations and as many RAF planes dispersed as night bombers would be. The 474th was assigned the job of laying cerise and white colored panels some 500 feet behind the front line in friendly territory as a protective measure so the pilots could avoid dropping bombs on Allied troops. The effort was successful; only two clusters of bombs fell behind Allied lines, the result of faulty bomb racks. The only “friendly” casualty reported was a minor wound, but the bombs left craters 20 feet in diameter.
The 474th was still at Venwegen on Thanksgiving. Capt. Herlihy remembers special efforts made to make the American troops feel at home on this most American of holidays:
The 474th was still at Venwegen on Thanksgiving. Capt. Herlihy remembers special efforts made to make the American troops feel at home on this most American of holidays:
I remember getting the burgomeister to requisition enough china and silver to set up a mess hall in a stable across the street from the farmhouse we had as a command post. A hot turkey meal was served to everyone, in shifts. We also got him to provide bedsheets for tablecloths, and turkey with all the trimmings, including apple and raisin pie cooked by Sgt. Steve Gura and his incomparable crew. Also, two kegs from a local brewery.34
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| You can see what Jack was eluding to in this additional photo of shelling at Duren. |
The men on the gun crews were being used as spotters for V-1s and V-2s and warning the rear echelon where these bombs were falling. They were also ordered to engage enemy aircraft who were releasing them. The weather became cold and wet and the men fixed up cozy spots near their guns to make things a little more homey. Some of the crews and command posts were able to find houses near their sites, and a few built trailers. Winter wear was issued to the men. This consisted of heavy socks with a double wool sole, and sleeping bags and pyramidal tents with coal stoves. But the miserable weather was still depressing. Gun crews can’t always be too close to houses. They need a full field of fire in order to have plenty of time to draw a bead on enemy planes. Therefore, the men had to devise fancy foxholes. They learned a lot about building foxholes and soon discovered that a foxhole is not just hole in the ground and that a shallow foxhole is a soldier’s grave. The German provincial style included electric lights, running water, shrapnel-proof roofs and stoves. The two-man job was deep enough to allow plenty of room to move around. It was lined with straw and covered with a two-foot thick roof of boards, dirt, rocks and sod. This type provided safety against all except direct hits. Some of the crew dug large, almost room-size holes into the sides of a hill which was near a quarry. They ran extension cords to the batteries of the half-tracks for light and so constructed them that upon entering, one had to step down into the “living room.” A few took over empty German pillboxes on the Siegfried Line and ate, slept and lived in comfort, while the weather outside got nastier and nastier. One of the nicest was one designed and built by a staff sergeant in the sheer rock of a quarry. When he hit the sack, he simply pulled up a ladder and was safe from ground attack for the night. The walls were lined with wood, and a series of shelves served as a kitchen. He cooked on a two-burner stove and had a small replica of the old-fashioned pot-belly stove for heat. A five-gallon can hung from the ceiling and supplied water. A line to a field generator gave current for the radio and reading lamp.35
“I was never much for foxholes, Jack adds. “I slept in a house or other building whenever I could. Our battery never stayed in one place long enough to make anyplace feel like home anyway.”
During this time, Cpl. Pat Toselli decided to cook his comrades in A Battery’s 2nd Platoon command post an Italian meal. While the rest of the guys scrounged for wine glasses and plates and set the table in the dining room of a farmhouse they were living in, Toselli was left alone in the kitchen to cook the meal. Only later did someone notice Toselli didn’t eat, and it was much later before he revealed why. Apparently, as he was draining the spaghetti, it fell out of the strainer and into the dirty sink. “But because the men had their hearts set so much on the meal he decided to let them enjoy it.”36
Just as the unit was getting comfy, the 474th received orders to move on. As they moved through towns such as Stolberg and Aachen, they saw brick-littered streets with rubble piled high from falling walls and buildings damaged in the bombings.
“I remember this air attack near Aachen,” Jack adds. There were 27 enemy planes flying low, in formation and acting like they were a training flight. Everybody opened up and shot the hell out of them. We heard later that the pilots were not too well-seasoned.”
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