Past Paris and nearing Belgium

Jack at Belleau Wood, the site
of a major WWI battle.

Although some of the men may have taken a detour to Paris on the sly, the 474^th officially bypassed the capital city, still following the VII Corps as it drove northeast from Melun to Meaux on the Marne River. “There was a canal in Meaux that flowed toward Paris, and our gun section was positioned alongside it,” Jack says. “Some Frenchmen were fishing in the canal, but with little success. I suggested to them that I use some TNT to stun the fish and bring them to the top. I did, and a lot of French people ate very well that day.”

The battalion continued moving along with the 1^st Army, away from Paris but along the route of World War I battles. On the way from Meaux to Soisson, it passed Chateau Thierry, Compiegne and cemeteries from WWI. “We were positioned at the edge of Soisson when someone started a rumor that enemy soldiers were in the tower of the old church near the middle of town,” Jack says. “Everybody and his brother were firing at the tower. When the firing finally stopped, it was discovered there were no enemy soldiers in the church. I think several civilians were killed and not a few wounded, though.”

By Sept. 1, the entire battalion ended up near Hirson, just a few miles from France's border with Belgium. On Sept. 2, shortly after dawn, A Battery spotted its first buzz bombs in the east, traveling west toward England at speeds of 200 to 250 mph. “At first we shot at them,” Jack says. “But if you knocked them down they could do a lot of damage, and they did. It wasn’t too long before we were told not to shoot at them."

Mookie, the littlest Ack-Ack gunner.

Somewhere near the Belgian border, a woman who’d been keeping company with a German officer who’d fled gave the officer’s dog to Jack’s gun crew. The Pomeranian, named Mookie, would stay with them through the remainder of the war, and she and her puppies would go back to the states with various members of the battalion.

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.”

To Bastogne and the Ruhr region

Jack is the soldier kneeling in the foreground. This photo must have
been sent home because it's stamped by censors Feb. 7, 1945.

Battery A moved successively to Ereze, which was a winter resort, La Josse, Malempre, Collas and Mon le Bon. During this period the battalion experienced several casualties and A Battery had two fatalities. On Jan. 17, the day after the VII and VIII Corps finally linked up, Charles C. Cowart and Paskel Harris were killed when a tank mine exploded near them.

As the VII Corps assembled near Ochain, Belgium, for a much needed 12-day rest period, the 474^th 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 1^st 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 474^th ended its brief respite by moving to a position behind the VII Corps’ 104^th 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 172^nd Field Artillery.

The end of February found the Allies fighting at the Roer River dams. As part of these engagements, the 474^th 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 172^nd Field Artillery from Tosdorf to Binsfield.

At 10:45 on the morning of the 25^th, A Battery spotted six Me 262s circling at medium altitude and preparing to attack their convoy with the 172^nd. 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 3^rd Armored Division reached the Rhine River March 4 and, with the 104^th Infantry, fought its way to Cologne, the largest German city to fall to the Allies. After guarding the Erft Canal, the 474^th 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 1^st 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 9^th Armored Division had seized intact a crossing over the Rhine—the Ludendorff railway bridge at Remagen. The 78^th Infantry was attached to the VII Corps to continue to clear more territory north of the bridge sites, and the 474^th 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 1^st 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 474^th 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 980^th 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 474^th 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 183^rd Field Artillery Battalion, supporting the 3^rd 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 1^st 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 980^th Field Artillery and ordered to the vicinity of Denke to make contact with the 238^th 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 951^st Field Artillery to Katlenberg, Schwiegerhausen and Horden.⁴³