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| Jack is the soldier kneeling in the foreground. This photo must have been sent home because it's stamped by censors Feb. 7, 1945. |
As the VII Corps assembled near Ochain, Belgium, for a much needed 12-day rest period, the 474th moved back to familiar surroundings between Namur and Dinant. A Battery was in Hamois, and each of the batteries took turns taking its half-tracks to Namur for maintenance. During this period the men were billeted in private homes, living with normal Belgian families—a rare treat! Mail and packages that couldn’t be delivered for the past month began arriving, and it was like Christmas a month late.
However, by the end of January, the 1st Army was back up against the Siegfried Line, holding a front between the Hurtgen Forest and St. Vith. The VII Corps returned to sectors on the west bank of the Roer River, and the 474th ended its brief respite by moving to a position behind the VII Corps’ 104th division on Feb. 3-4. The entire battalion went as far as Stolberg on Feb. 3, then branched off to assignments, with A Battery going to Heistern with the 172nd Field Artillery.
The end of February found the Allies fighting at the Roer River dams. As part of these engagements, the 474th took down some enemy planes. Six raids of 21 enemy planes were counted and claims entered for three Cat Is and five Cat IIs. River crossings began to take place by the Allies, and A Battery traveled with the 172nd Field Artillery from Tosdorf to Binsfield.
At 10:45 on the morning of the 25th, A Battery spotted six Me 262s circling at medium altitude and preparing to attack their convoy with the 172nd. As the convoy moved along at 35 miles per hour, the gunners fired at the Luftwaffe, damaging one of them and driving the remainder off. It was tricky shooting as one gunner put it. “We were traveling in the same direction as the planes, so we actually cut off 35 mph from speed of the targets…There were five more raids by Me 262s, when the Luftwaffe attacked with nine planes on March 2. A Battery bagged two of them.40
The 3rd Armored Division reached the Rhine River March 4 and, with the 104th Infantry, fought its way to Cologne, the largest German city to fall to the Allies. After guarding the Erft Canal, the 474th moved near to Cologne, and A Battery went to the Cologne suburb of Junkersdorf.
As the VII Corps moved toward Bonn, A Battery was sent to Paulshof. The 1st Infantry Division was added to the VII Corps on March 8 and given the job of capturing Bonn, which fell after stubborn resistance. All totaled, the VII Corps cleared 84 kilometers along the west bank of the Rhine and captured more than 18,000 prisoners.
Meanwhile, on March 7, elements of the 9th Armored Division had seized intact a crossing over the Rhine—the Ludendorff railway bridge at Remagen. The 78th Infantry was attached to the VII Corps to continue to clear more territory north of the bridge sites, and the 474th joined in the fray mid-month. Both A and C batteries were ordered to Rolanseck on the west side of the river, but then C Battery was told to remain on the east side at Honnef to protect a floating treadway bridge 1,176 feet long, the first bridge the VII Corps engineers had completed across the Rhine. These troops then had to live in an eerie smokescreen put out for added protection.
“We were down river a few miles from the bridge,” Jack explains, “right along the Rhine, where they were bringing supplies in. We were there to protect the supply lines in case the German aircraft tried to molest the supply planes, but I don’t remember any action. I do remember the planes coming down real low and dropping the supplies instead of landing.”
The lack of action left time for some visiting. “My close friend from home, Jim Fair, was in an anti-aircraft group command and was in a position to know where my outfit was assigned. He looked me up while we were at the Rhine, and we had a nice visit.”
There were also some opportunities for exploring and having fun. Jack remembers one such incident, and Ray Bilicki, his buddy, remembers another. “At Rolanseck, some of the guys found a dachshund and gave it some beer. It got drunk and was walking sideways,” Jack says.
Ray tells of a safe they found in Remagen. “We had visions of becoming millionaires,” he says. “We shot at it, used hand grenades and everything else in order to get it open. But to our misfortune, we never did. That should tell you the kind of soldiers we were. I maintain to this date that if the Army had more like us, the world would be speaking German today.”
On March 25, the 1st Army launched its attack out of the Remagen Bridgehead, advancing 20 km in the first day’s drive. Three days later, Batteries A and D of the 474th were sent to Altenkirchen to provide ground defense for the VII Corps, but they returned to the field artillery just two days afterward. Battery A’s next assignment was with the 980th Field Artillery at Lippe.
The trap was closing on the highly developed Ruhr industrial region of Germany. Inside its 5,000 square miles, more than 350,000 enemy soldiers of German Army Group D were completely cut off from supplies and reinforcements.
As the armored units of the VII Corps vaulted along from Marburg toward Paderborn, the 474th kept right up with them in making jumps of 20 and 30 miles. One day B Battery convoyed 72 miles. The countryside with it storybook houses once more became pretty much of a blur as the armored columns thrust into the Hessian Hills past small decentralized industrial plants that had been scattered outside the Ruhr. Near them stood the ugly barbed-wire stockades that had been used to cage the slave labor who now roamed the streets, some pedaling bicycles taken from the Germans. As the convoys moved down the roads, there were streams of refugees from France and Belgium taking the long walk to their homes, which they hadn’t seen since the early 1940s. They were a pitiful sight, just skin and bones in tattered clothes, some with pots and pans hanging over their shoulders. In the twilight they cooked soup from scraps they picked up along the way. It seemed so difficult to believe that these men, now reduced to animals’ level, had once been respected heads of families and wage-earners in their communities. Stories which had been read when the GIs were school teachers, clerks, salesmen and students popped into mind. These stories told how Hitler’s men pulled people out of their homes and away from their families and shipped them east to work for the Third Reich. It was then we realized that our trip was worthwhile. For without the fanfare and flag-waving it felt good to make men free again. This is what the war was all about.41
Because the 474th moved around a lot, it didn’t use much of its TNT supply. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, Jack found an alternative use for his stockpile—exploding it in the river as a fishing aid. He used his technique again here, but the refugees had to grab the fish quickly before the fast current carried them away.
During this period, B Battery had several successful encounters with the enemy. During the afternoon of March 29, while in convoy with the 183rd Field Artillery Battalion, supporting the 3rd armored division, a German ammunition flak train made up of a locomotive and seven cars was spotted heading toward Lelbach.
Waiting unit it was within 500 yards of the convoy, the tank commander attempted to fire a shot from his gun, which was jammed. He then opened up with a 30-caliber machine gun, but the train continued on. Immediately behind the tank was one of B Battery’s M-15 half-tracks, commanded by Corp. Willis S. Lancaster, of Richmond, VA. Lancaster ordered his guns turned onto the train, and after zeroing in with 50-caliber tracers, he opened up with his 37mm gun. One of the first shots hit the locomotive boiler, which went up with gratifying effects. The engineer jumped from the cab as two other M-15s…and one M-16 half-track with quad-mounted 50s opened up…All the tracks racked the entire train with fire so effectively that two carloads of 20mm ammunition blew up. The other cars were armed with 20mm flak guns for the protection of the train. However, caught unawares, the soldiers manning the guns jumped off and the entire train was destroyed within a period of 20 minutes.42
Early in the morning the next day, while forming for convoy on the outskirts of Giershagen with the rest of the task force, an FW 190 on a reconnaissance mission flew low over the area. The majority of the battery’s half-tracks opened up and knocked the plane out of the sky. The pilot bailed out, and the plane crashed in the vicinity of Hespringhausen.
Later that day, while trying to clean out snipers in a town, T/5 William Scott, of Canton, NC, located a sniper and stepped out from the protection of the tank to direct fire at him. Instead, the sniper fired at Scott first and killed him instantly. All totaled, B Battery killed 75 Germans that day, including the one who killed Scott, and took 175 prisoners, most of them SS troopers.
Starting April 7, the 1st Army opened the drive that was to be its last operation of the war—to advance toward Leipzig and Dresden and connect with Soviet forces advancing from the east. On April 8, the VII Corps crossed the Weser River. A Battery was relieved of its role with the 980th Field Artillery and ordered to the vicinity of Denke to make contact with the 238th Engineer Battalion and move the bridge site across the Weser River with it. Later, elements of A Battery protected bridges at Rheder, Beverungen and Blankenau. When it was relieved of its Weser River crossings, it went with the 951st Field Artillery to Katlenberg, Schwiegerhausen and Horden.43
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