Maneuvers and mishaps

The aftermath of Operation Tiger, a practice run 6 weeks
before D-Day at Slapton Sands

Various pre-invasion training maneuvers included:¹¹

• Constructing platforms similar to the landing craft that would be used in the invasion, complete with comps, so drivers could practice how to back onto the ramps then drive out into the surf
• Learning how to waterproof the tracks with a rubber substance
• Discovering and disarming booby traps and land mines
• Crawling across obstacle courses as live rounds of ammunition were fired overhead
• Testing gas masks in rooms filled with tear gas
• Boarding an actual LST (landing ship tank), shipping out into the channel and landing in the surf to give drivers a lesson in surfing the half-tracks.
• Practice firing at sleeves towed by airplanes.

The unit was shaping up well, as this passage from The Maverick Outfit attests:

When they first went to an English range they were told by their hosts to be ready when the plane came by and not waste time because gasoline, or “petrol,” was scarce. The plane could not afford to make a run and not have all the guns firing. As it turned out it was the gunners who had to wait for the plane, for as it came by on its first run, there was so much fire power thrown up and the shooting was so accurate, that the sleeve was shot right off the towing line. Then the plane released a second sleeve and a little while later that was shot down. Then the men twiddled their thumbs as the plane landed to get more sleeves. As the men began to realize that their shooting was so good, they also began to realize they were going to be well up front in the big show. This feeling became stronger when, at one of the firing ranges, they were visited by a group of big Army brass. In the midst of them they recognized Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley. It was learned many years later that he had personally inspected every outfit that was going to land on D-Day.¹²

Jack remembers seeing Bradley. “He was about 20 yards away from where I was standing,” he says. “And the firing results were just as described. Later we learned they decided which of the two AAA-AW units would go in on Omaha Beach and Utah by the flip of a coin. The one that went in on Omaha was so torn up the Army didn’t even rebuild it.”

As the 474^th completed individual training exercises successfully, it joined other Army and Navy units in a pair of landings called Tiger Exercises. These joint exercises revealed flaws but were costly in lives. Stephen Ambrose in D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II describes what happened:

In the rehearsal for the VII Corps at Utah, Operation Tiger, held on the night of April 27-28 at Slapton Sands, there were some missed schedules resulting in traffic jams and some naval craft arriving late at embarkation points. Much worse, German E-boats slipped through the British destroyer screen and sank two LSTs and damaged six others. Over 749 men were killed and 300 wounded in the explosions or drowned afterward. Lessons were learned that saved lives on D-Day. There had been no rescue craft in the Tiger formation. Naval commanders realized that they would be needed. The men had not been taught how to use their life preservers. After Tiger, they were. It turned out that the British were operating on different radio wavelengths than the Americans, which contributed to the disaster. That was fixed. What could not be so easily fixed was the weather. Visibility had been poor on April 27-28 and the American fighter planes had not shown up.¹³

Although no one from the 474^th was directly involved in the mishap, they were nearby. Captain James Herlihy, commanding officer of C Battery shared this description:

We sailed from Torquay, a resort town on the southern coast of England, on LSTs. I remember being up on the deck the night before the landing, enjoying all the activity and wondering how all of this activity on the water could be kept hidden from all those curious people on the French coast, which really was not all that far off. It must have been about 1 a.m. when I heard a roar of small boat engines. I saw nothing, but then an LST behind us blew up with a roar, and in the glare I saw several 2½ ton trucks rolling end over end into the red haze over the flaming ship. Less than a minute later, the same thing happened to the LST in front of us. The rest of the night was spent waiting for the same things to happen to us, but we landed and took up positions defending the landing area, ammunition dumps and roads leading away from the beach. When the time came for us to be relieved for a new mission inland, our relief had not arrived. I went to the beach master and asked where was D of the 435^th and when would they relieve us and was told, “They won’t be in.” They were on one of the LSTs which had been blown up.¹⁴

“I remember the Tiger exercises, too,” Jack adds. “A German plane woke me up in the middle of the night when he flew real low trying to duck the searchlight.”

The channel voyage on D-Day

The 474^th’s half-tracks left Bridgwater early on the morning of May 8, 1944, and began the all-day ride to the invasion assembly area. They arrived about 5 p.m. and moved into tents that would be their homes for the next few weeks.

Preparation for the invasion stepped up at this point. The half-tracks were waterproofed for their cross-channel journey, guns were made ready, and cartridge belts that had been empty for a year and a half were finally filled. In addition to M-1 rifle ammunition, each man was given two bandoleers, a supply of hand grenades, puke bags, sea-sick pills and toilet paper. The food improved as well, as Jack recalls. “We knew it was getting close when they started giving us steak three meals a day.”

The outfit moved onto LST number 47 in the marshalling area near Dartmouth in the early days of June. For the assault on the beaches, they were attached to the VII Corps of the 1^st Army, under the immediate control of the 11^th AAA group.¹⁵ Capt. Herlihy, who hailed from Beechurst, Long Island, NY, recalled those last few pre-invasion hours:

The plan was for me to precede the battery (with A Battery, as I remember) and reconnoiter for positions before C Battery came in. We rode ot Darmouth with A Battery [Jack’s battery] June 3 and loaded into an English LCT [landing craft tank]…We went up the beautiful Dart River a mile or so and spent a beautiful night at anchor, wondering how much THEY knew. If you remember, for a few days before we left the camp in the marshalling area, Axis Sally kept telling us on the radio that they were waiting for us in France. Naturally, we figured that they already knew what we knew. The next morning we were in an endless column of craft, four wide, that went up and back as far as one could see. Then we spotted similar columns on both flanks. It was staggering and sobering—HOW could THEY miss all this activity?...We had each been issued $4 in French invasion currency, but as the cards and dice came out, the money went from many small piles of $4 each to one or two piles of many, many francs each…At 5:30 a.m. [now June 4] we slipped our moorings and eased down river, passing LST 281, with C Battery aboard but few awake…The countryside was beautiful and soon we met the swell of the channel. Laterthat day we rendezvoused in Torquay with many other craft. The next day [June 5] saw us in the channel, joined now by destroyers, cruisers and battleships…It clouded up rapidly, and a strong wind blew up. Now all the guns were covered up, and the spray reached back to the bridge, all the way astern, as waves broke over the bow. I huddled there with the English lieutenant and wondered what an artilleryman was doing in this clamshell which barely floated even with nobody shooting at us. As the waves grew, water sloshed back and forth on the deck, where the half-tracks were. As the men lined the rails, a trail of mails floated behind us. The thought struck me—if all the ships are like this one the subs need not see us, they could smell our trail. As the day worsened, I felt that practically nobody would be ready for action if it came. I guess the same thought hit others, for an American patrol ship hove to, and an officer yelled over, “D-Day has been postponed 24 hours until 0530 June 6^th.” Several at our rail who were then losing supper volunteered advice on what he could do with his bloody invasion, but he ignored them as if he handled all his invasions this way…At 0430 [June 6] I awoke, put on my shoes and went to the bridge. It was dark, and we were barely moving in a slight swell. But on the horizon, hordes of bombers droned, tremendous bursts of flame and tinted smoke were all over; flack burst and tracers arched all over the sky. It was staggering. Then all the naval craft opened up. You’d see the muzzle flare, the tracer round arch into the coast, a tremendous burst of flame, and finally the roar of the shots would roll across the water. It seemed impossible for life to survive ashore. As dawn came, our fighters strafed targets ashore. We began to head in now, and as we passed in front of a battleship, the old Texas [Ambrose identifies it as the Arizona but Jack remembers it as the Texas, too], she let go a broadside that must have pushed us sideways several feet. Screaming and cursing at their lack of consideration, we inched shoreward. Shore fire must have been effective, for suddenly one of our P-38 twin-hulled fighters dove down and began to lay smoke just off the beach. We could see the enemy tracer creeping up his tail while he held the steady course he had to, in order to make the smoke effective. Finally, he blew up in a tremendous ball of fire, as a second P-38 resumed, and other fighters handled the ack-ack units. We were speechless at the fate of the unknown hero.¹⁶

Col. William A. Stricklen Jr., commanding officer of the 474^th, was nearby in another LCT with his own set of thoughts and concerns as the bombardment continued. He saw a billow of smoke 100 yards away from an LCT that had been hit by German fire. Stricklen helped pull a wounded soldier from the craft out of the water and took him to the dispensary. At 6 a.m., Allied fire subsided and his LCT moved forward again.

Then, about 6,000 yards offshore, Stricklen’s LCT, which carried about 75 people, was hit by enemy fire. Since the colonel had to get to the beach to establish his command post, he stopped a small Navy boat carrying only a crew of two and hitched a ride to shore. They let him out about 75 feet from dry land. At one point he stepped into a shell hole and was submerged, but got out of it. The water was no more than waist high the rest of the way.¹⁷ 


The video included below begins with the channel crossing and ends with the liberation of Paris:

Into Deutschland

Jack and members of his gun crew took turns posing in this
abandoned German airplane shot down outside of Duren.

On Sept. 20, the 474^th moved from Eupen to Walheim, and the atmosphere changed quickly from the adoring, thronging crowds who greeted them in Belgium to the sullen, conquered Germans.

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.

Jack with Frank Geesey (left), who
alerted him to the land mine he'd
very nearly stepped on.

“While we were in the Hurtgen Forest, two other fellows and I decided to take a short cut through the forest to our battalion control post because we hadn’t had any mail for about a week,” Jack remembers. “We came to what had been an enemy trench (now unoccupied, of course) with barbed wire and mine signs. Since the area had been heavily shelled sometime prior and a path through was opened, we decided to proceed and use the path to cross over the trench. I agreed to lead the way, and the other two agreed to space themselves 15 feet and 30 feet in back of me.

“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.

“I was somewhat speechless for a moment, then decided to go back to my gun position to get some TNT for blowing up the mine. The other two fellows high-tailed it back to their gun positions, at the same time telling me they would never follow me anyplace again. Another fellow and I got the TNT, returned to the mine and blew it up; it was a large mine.”

The stay in this dull, dreary area was long, as supply routes form Cherbourg were replaced with ones from Antwerp. But it had its pluses, too. It gave the outfit a chance to rest up. Some soldiers, including Jack, even got leaves to travel to Verviers in Belgium and to Paris.

On the back of this photo taken near Duren,
Jack wrote, "The walls are still standing on
this one. Lucky people who live here!"

So far, the 474^th had been pretty lucky, experiencing only minor casualties and just one death. But that was about to change as enemy defensive activity in the German homeland picked up. Oct. 1, Headquarters moved to Nutheim, and the Germans heavily shelled convoys moving past B Battery’s position at Breinig. B Battery’s Albert Margolis was killed in this exchange. On the afternoon of Oct. 5, all four batteries engaged 25 to 30 FW 190s, downing 13 and damaging 10 others. Then, on the evening of Oct. 14, B  Battery was heavily bombed, and one soldier was killed, although The Maverick Outfit doesn’t identify him. On Nov. 4, B and C Batteries were heavily shelled. Several men were wounded, and one man lost his leg. C Battery moved to Venwegen with the 172^nd Field Artillery, where it experienced heavy shelling that killed Pvt. Arthur J. LaGrotta.

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 1^st 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 1^st Army to take Duren. The attack began at noon, Nov. 16, with 1,200 8^th Air Force bombers flying in tight formations and as many RAF planes dispersed as night bombers would be. The 474^th 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 474^th 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

You can see what Jack was eluding
to in this additional photo of
shelling at Duren.

As the action continued, winter set in. And since the front line was stationary at this point, the 474^th dug in and tried to make itself as at-home as possible.

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 2^nd 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 474^th 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.

Battery A ended up in Schevenhutte with the 951^st Field Artillery as the month of December began with a bang. B Battery claimed a Cat I on Dec. 1. Then on Dec. 3, shortly after 1 p.m., all batteries engaged 25 to 30 FW 190s and Me 109s attacking the roads and troop installation between Eschweiler and Zweifall, bagging 15 planes and damaging nine others.³⁷

“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.”

The Battle of the Bulge

The Ardennes-Alsace Campaign, which would later become known as the Battle of the Bulge, began Dec. 16 at 5 a.m. when German Gen. Von Rundstedt attacked five different places along the 1^st Army front in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium.

Members of Jack's gun crew brave the snow and cold in the Hurtgen Forest.

When Jack’s group pulled back from the Hurtgen Forest, just over the border in Germany, for reassignment to the Ardennes, they had to endure a long trip in very cold weather. “This  was one of the coldest winters on record in Europe, and I believe it,” Jack says. “I almost froze my legs and had to have help to get the circulation up to par.”

But it wasn’t without its humorous moments. “About halfway through the trip, we stopped at a refreshment center set up by the Army with bathrooms, hot coffee, snacks, etc.,” he says. “Other units had preceded us at this stop and had built a log fire inside a small stone house that had the windows knocked out. Everything seemed to be stone, mortar and plaster, and the ceiling was very high. I decided to use the bathroom, and when I opened the door I discovered the bathtub had been used as a commode. It was at least 80 percent filled with ‘honey.’ I have laughed many, many times about that sight.”

The Germans were making their final rally in the Ardennes, and some of the gun crews burned out gun barrel after gun barrel, firing every few minutes that day. Jack confirms this. “At one point we were told to keep our anti-aircraft guns depressed in order to help stop a possible enemy breakthrough.”

 December brought more enemy air actions for the battalion than any other month since the unit went into combat. There was a total of 19 raids, involving more than 100 enemy aircraft…As the German counter-offensive continued to penetrate deeper, the truth dawned on the men that they were in trouble and could be cut off.³⁸

Jack remembers this sense of panic well. “Our half-track got lost at one point, and it was the next afternoon before we found our outfit.”

Along about Dec. 18-19, the 474^th was reassigned to follow the 957^th Field Artillery, a howitzer unit. Capt. Herlihy relates: 

We started in two jeeps with them on a cold, snowy, sleety day, back down the hard-won roads towards Stolberg, below Aachen, Verviers, and Liege. We went back to the Meuse Valley, purported to be the objective of the German push, went through Huy, and headed south toward Marche and Bastogne. The general idea was that the VII Corps would pull back from the Rhineland, swing to the rear of the hard-pressed V Corps, and try to hold the right shoulder of the Bulge, as it was now called. Since the arrow-shaped penetration split the 1^st and 3^rd American Armies of the 21^st Army group under Gen. Bradley, it made good sense for the 1^st Army to pass under control of the British Army Group, which now ran from the Bulge up to the North Sea. It was misinterpreted at home, and also by some of the British troops who came down to join us. They advised us that they had come to save the Yanks. When the Battery caught up to us, we were advised by the field artillery to whom we were attached that C Battery had its own mission now, and was given a small part of the Ourthe River to hold, and that we were not to fall back from this position. Against an armored force, this would be a tall order, but all along the recon route, we had passed 90mm guns, put at isolated crossroads, with the same orders. The German push had to be slowed until the sides of the Bulge could be beefed up. It was cold, icy and miserable, but we already knew of many American units that had been cut to pieces while holding similar crossroads in the path of the attack. We passed many fields of American mines just strewn on the ground, with no time for concealment or burial in the frozen ground. Anything to slow down the push. In the rural areas we were defending, there were few houses, so a typical night was spent on the frozen ground, with the snow scraped off the ground, and pine branches under the sleeping bag, waiting for the sounds of tanks or vehicles. Is there anything colder than an outdoor latrine, behind a tree, in the snow?...Life in the gun sections was just plain miserable, for a good gun position had to have a field of fire, and that meant no wind protection. A fire was a problem. Seats on the guns were the coldest places around, but the guns had to be manned all day. At night, the best move was to pair guns to reduce the need for guards. The weather was miserable. Finally, on Christmas Day, the overcast broke and the Allies put up everything that could fly. What a wonderful sight to see contrails all over the sky. We yelled like kids as the rumble of bombings came from just over the horizon, in Germany, and on targets within the base of the Bulge.³⁹

In a conversation just a few months before Jack passed away, he and son Jack Jr. talked about these days. Jack Sr. was by then living in a nursing home, and Jack Jr. had come to visit, found him asleep and sat in a chair reading until his dad awakened. Jack Jr. was reading No Silent Night: The Christmas Battle for Bastogne by by Don Cygan and Leo Barron. 

"He asked me if the book was about the Bulge, and I said yes. He asked if there were any maps in the book. There were several, and I picked out one that showed the Allied and German lines around Christmas 1944. He studied the map a minute and then pointed to me where his outfit was near Bastogne.

"On the map, he pointed out the importance of Bastogne. It was the rail and communcations center for southern Belgium and Luxembourg. The German's goal was to cut off the Allies from the port of Antwerp, Belgium, now the Allied major supply center. To do that, they had to have control of Bastogne."

In spite of what The Maverick Outfit reported (referenced earlier), Jack told his son they had no winter gear and limited supplies and ammunition. They were also being shelled multiple times a day by German artillery, and their orders were to hold the line, meaning that if the Germans attacked and they ran out of ammunition, fighting would be hand-to-hand. 

"He smiled a bit then and said, 'If you could get over the fact you were in a war, the shelling was the greatest light show I ever saw,'" Jack Jr. related. "He said he and two buddies alternated spending an hour in a burnt-out halftrack to keep warm since it was the coldest winter in Europe in a century. On Christmas Eve night they could hear the Germans singing Silent Night, and the Germans could hear them. 

"On Christmas morning, he said the weather cleared and the Allies were able to air-drop supplies to their armies in the field and bomb the German positions. Also, General Patton's army broke through and attacked the German left flank, thus breaking the siege.

"His remembrance of the details was awesome," Jack Jr. continued. "I felt like I was there. The whole thing was a very special moment."

The Battle of the Bulge reached its climax a few days after Christmas 1944 when the American 2^nd Armored Division blocked the path of the German 2^nd Armored, and the two groups hammered each other for three days. The Americans left 81 panzers smoking in the hills and halted Von Runstedt’s advance. On the third day, the enemy began to fall back, and the 1^st Army launched its drive to wipe out the bulge in its lines that had been caused by the initial German successes.

"Dad's recall of this situation was clear and precise, too," Jack Jr. adds. "He even remembered they had to capture the town of Foy, which had been held by the Germans. They assaulted Foy across an open farm field while the Germans held the town and controlled the field of fire. Surviving that is a miracle in itself.

"Even though dad's health was failing at the time he shared all this with me, his mind was not. He particularly recalled not only the terrible cold and low supplies but also the great courage of his fellow soldiers during what seemed like a hopeless situation. In spite of it all, he said they believed 'everything would work out,' and it did. These guys and their comrades never gave up or gave in. When I think about this, I do know how special this discussion was and how special our dad and his comrades were."

The weather continued bitter cold in the first week of January 1945. Snow fell steadily, piling up on tree branches and covering over those who’d died earlier in the campaign. The half-tracks had to be moved every so often to keep them from freezing in the ground. The 474^th was moving with the 109^th AAA Group and giving protection to VII Corps artillery, so it made a wide circle to the east, then headed southeast toward Bastogne, which was already surrounded.

Jan. 25, 1945, is recognized as the end of this most bloody battle of WWII. This color footage does a good job of showing the conditions our soldiers had to endure.
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