You're in the Army now!

Jack in his dress uniform

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the United States entered World War II on the side of the Allies, Jack M. Clark was about a year out of high school. He tried to enlist but was turned down because of an alleged heart murmur. The following spring he suffered a fractured skull in a car accident. In the fall he got a draft notice, and the Army doctor declared him fit for service this time around.

The 474^th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion, of which Jack became a part, began nameless as a group of recruits from up and down the eastern United States. There were men from large cities such as Baltimore, Washington, Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Erie and Philadelphia, and others from small towns such as Bassett, VA, Tarboro, NC, and New Kensington, PA, where Jack hailed from. Little did they know as they boarded troop trains in December 1942 they would play a role in the greatest military event of all time: D-Day.

The trains themselves were described as “old, decrepit and depressing.”¹ A 20-year-old Jack would add “dirty” to that list as he tells of his trip from home:

My instructions for entering the U.S. Army were to board the train in New Kensington with a large group of draftees and proceed to Camp Meade, MD. I think we arrived there sometime during the next day. We slept in our seats. The train was dirty, but, of course, we didn’t expect Pullman reservations. I wouldn’t call my stay at Meade an exciting one, but it was full of surprises, since none of the group had ever had this kind of exposure. Little did we know then that there were bigger surprises down the road. We received some shots and uniforms, took tests, pulled clean-up details to keep us busy and wondered what our destinations would be. I guess the chow was OK at this point, since I don’t remember anything too different from civilian life. Somewhere during this routine we were asked if we had any preference as to what type of outfit we would like to go to for our basic training. I never met anyone who ever ended up in the outfit he named!

Lt. Steve Martinique
of  Coaldale, PA, was
Jack's lieutenant.

Each man was given two pairs of GI shoes, another two pairs of winter and summer underwear, socks, handkerchiefs, jackets, pants and a big, heavy overcoat. The shirt, coat and overcoat were to be buttoned at all times, on or off duty, as were the pockets of the shirts.

At this point, each man was also given a piece of brown paper, about a yard square, and a piece of string and told to use it to wrap their civilian clothes to be sent home. The Maverick Outfit shares an anecdote related to this activity that was indicative of life in the Army:

One man asked for another piece of paper for his hat. It was one of those broad-brimmed hats popular with the teen-agers in the early 40s. “Oh, that paper is big enough for the hat,” he was told, and the soldier supervising the recruits simply squashed the hat down with his hand.²

After about a week, Jack says the group was on a train headed toward New York City that ended up at Camp Edwards, CT. “This was a troop train with the usual accommodations,” Jack says, “which means we were glad to get the hell off of it when we arrived at our destination. I suppose they wanted us to appreciate our accommodations at Camp Edwards.”

Sgt. Fletcher Marshall
of  Richmond, VA,
was Jack's sergeant.

Barracks at this camp consisted of numerous, seemingly identical, white, two-story buildings. Each building was filled with double-decked bunks, and a latrine on the ground floor was for the use of men housed on both floors.

The non-coms and officers, referred to as the cadre, were from New England and drawn from the 207^th coast Artillery Regiment. It was formerly the 7^th regiment of New York, an exclusive National Guard outfit made up of the area’s bluebloods, and was renamed the 207^th when called into federal service.

“Basic training at Camp Edwards was very impressive for me,” Jack relates. “I really liked the marching, drilling, exercise, hiking, double-timing and instructions on small arms and the larger guns. But I didn’t care for the extreme cold weather or the ‘short arm’ inspections in the middle of the night.” As for the food, Jack says, “It wasn’t that great, although there was never enough of it to kill anyone. The post exchange was nearby and usually stocked well.”

He remembers one particular breakfast in the mess hall during a spell unusually cold for even New England when they were served cornflakes and water rather than milk. Their mess sergeant had overdrawn rations, so the cornflakes were limited to one bowl. Of course, the men could have all the water they wanted. Square eggs were served frequently as well, and Jack says these were OK “unless you bit into a lump of baking soda.”

Jack also remembers a humorous incident from a hike during this period. “My platoon leader asked me to identify a plane flying overhead at the time. I couldn’t identify it, and he said, ‘It’s an airplane, Clark.’”

AWOL from North Carolina

Jack clowns around at Camp Davis, NC, with his newly issued rifle.

With maneuvers completed, the 474^th left its half-tracks behind and moved to Fort Fisher, near Wilmington, NC. At that time, this fort was one of the oldest posts in the Army and, according to The Maverick Outfit, one of the prettiest:

Green-painted 15-men barracks are scattered at right angles among the pine trees, with the battery kitchen and latrine in the midst of the battery area. Highway 241 went through the camp in back of the beach, and sandy roads branch off and meander through the area. It’s like a vast picnic grove…The fort dated back to the Civil War; in fact, a sign down the road said, “Fort Fisher—Built by the Confederacy.” It fell in 1865 to the Union Army. At one time, it cut off Wilmington and was the last port for blockade running.⁴

Jack doesn’t remember much about Fort Fisher other than it was near the ocean, so there was a lot of sand. His general impressions of the camp, though, were quite different from those already related. “The barracks were older than the Porter farm. Too bad they weren’t destroyed during the Civil War.”

The Porter farm, of course, was where his wife, Wilma, was raised near Dayton, PA. Those who visited the farm in the 1950s and 60s will have a clear picture of how Fort Fisher must have appeared to Jack. And Jack, when he first saw the Porter farm in the late 1940s, must have been taken back to the old Confederate fort for a few scary moments.

Thankfully, the stay at Fort Fisher was brief, and on Dec. 5, 1943, the 474^th was moved to Camp Davis, NC, where the men were finally issued rifles. Jack doesn’t remember being too busy at Camp Davis. A lot of the guys went on furlough then, including Jack and his buddy, Ray Bilicki.

Both had three-day passes at Christmastime, nowhere near enough time to get them from North Carolina to Pennsylvania and back. But, Jack says, Ray wanted to go home for Christmas and talked him into going along. Ray turned his three-day leave into nine days, and Jack stretched his to 10. They kept making up three-day passes in the event they got stopped as they hitchhiked home and then back to camp.

Not only did Jack not get stopped, but “when I was nearing Camp Davis on my return I was given a ride by a 2^nd lieutenant driving an Army recon car. Just before we got to the gate he asked me if I had a pass, and I told him I did. He said, ‘OK, you won’t have to show it when we pass the gate. I’ll just show my trip papers.’ I gave him a big salute when he dropped me off in front of my battery headquarters.”

Under the circumstances, punishment for being AWOL—absent without official leave—was the offender’s choice of courts martial or battery punishment. Ray, who returned the day before Jack, was already serving battery punishment, which had to be administered within 24 hours. Jack appeared before the battery commander the morning after returning and also chose battery punishment. He then went on sick call with an acute sore throat (tonsillitis) and ended up in the camp hospital. He never did have to serve the battery punishment.

Over the sea to Great Britain

The Aquitania was the last of the four-stackers.
Cunard Lines retired it in 1950.

Early in 1944, the 474^th boarded yet another troop train, its last stateside, and moved up the east coast to New York City. The unit was billeted at nearby Camp Shanks and, for a short while, lived it up, taking the bus and the Weeahawken Ferry to the city.

Then one day the man said, “No passes today.” In the early hours of the next morning, the youths, who were green rookies just a year ago, and who were now polished soldiers, crammed the last of their belongings into a bag almost too big to be carried, staggered onto a ferry boat into which they were packed like sardines and sailed down the Hudson to Manhattan. Arriving at the pier, they carried their heavy barracks bags up the gang plank, which went up several stories into a ship that seemed to be some 10 stories high and a block long. Inside, they went up stairways and through corridors until they reached “A” deck, the top deck of the ship and found large ballrooms packed up to the ceiling with bunks. Some had to climb five bunks up to get a place to sit down.⁵

The four-stack Aquitania, sister ship of the sunken Lusitania and the retired Mauretania, set sail for Great Britain on Saturday morning, Jan. 29, 1944. For most of the men on board, it was their first ocean voyage but not to be their last. Jack remembers the boat ride well. “Manned by the English, we naturally had crappy food,” he recalls. “The traveling conditions were salt water to wash in and a terrible storm for most of the voyage with everybody getting seasick. We went around Iceland twice to avoid German submarines.”

The outfit pulled MP duty and manned the ship’s anti-aircraft guns, mounted in turrets high above the boat deck. They got their first shot at the Germans while aboard, firing on a German reconnaissance plane. A master sergeant became ill during the voyage and died, and Jack remembers that the corpse was lashed to the deck at the front of the ship to keep it frozen for the remainder of the voyage.

All commissioned officers, Navy nurses and Red Cross workers had their quarters on the top decks, “and we were not permitted in that area,” Jack says. “In my area, I was on the bottom bunk with three or four bunks above me. I had to be careful when I exited from my bunk so that I could duck the heave-ho from the seasick guys above.”

The Maverick Outfit reported, “As the Aquitania rolled and dipped into towering waves in a storm-tossed ocean, some of the fellows feared they would be thrown into the sea. Others wished they would. At one time, the boat listed 30 degrees, losing one of its lifeboats.”⁶

Jack adds that he volunteered to go with a few guys to the front of the ship and then down into the hold to secure his battery’s PX rations. “That was a mistake! This is the worst place to be on a ship when you’re in a storm. You lose all sense of direction and have to hold onto the rails on the stairs. What an experience!”

Eight days after leaving New York, the Aquitania passed the Shetland Islands along the west coast of Scotland and went through the North Channel past Northern Ireland before easing into the Firth of Clyde. Still aboard ship, the men received a letter on White House stationery bearing the signature of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and addressed to members of the United States Expeditionary Force. It said in part:

We who stay at home have our duties to perform—duties owed in many parts to you. You will be supported by the whole force and power of this nation. The victory you win will be a victory of all the people—common to them all…You bear with you the hope, the confidence, the gratitude and the prayers of your family, your fellow-citizens and your President.⁷

Another paper carried this message from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill:

To each American soldier who has left home to join the great forces now gathering in this island, I send a message of greeting and welcome. Wherever you may go in our country you will be among friends. Our fighting men look upon you as comrades and brothers in arms. Welcome to you while you are with us, and when the time comes we will go forward together and carry the good cause to final victory.⁸

Life among the Brits

The front end of a half-track looks like a truck or Jeep, but the 
back uses tank tracks instead of wheels. The roller mechanism 
on the front cleared mines.And, in the case of the 474th's half-
tracks, the rear end was fitted with anti-aircraft weaponry. 

The 474^th disembarked near Glasgow, spent the next leg of its journey on board trains and bunked temporarily in the town of Wallingford, England. On Feb. 23, 1944, it convoyed across the south part of England to Bridgwater, situated near where the Parrot River empties into an inlet of the Bristol Channel. Many of the soldiers were billeted in private homes, with a few in stores and shops.

“I was part of a group of maybe 25 from A Battery who were billeted in a one-room schoolhouse that opened onto an enclosed courtyard,” Jack says. “We were at one end of the town, while the rest of the battery was located at the other end. Our motor pool was also located with the rest of A Battery, and this required us to do a lot of walking. However, we had a great advantage since we were not subject to close scrutiny from those in charge.”

Jack in the gun turret of his
half-track, the Any Gum Chum?

That lack of scrutiny paid off for “Jack the Budding Entrepreneur.” While he says he enjoyed the firing range, designated hikes and seeing the countryside, “it became quite boring doing the repetitive drills on the guns and listening to boring talks on aircraft identification from very boring non-coms.” To make life more interesting—and lucrative, since he sent home all of his pay he was allowed to—he set up a cleaning business, mainly for trousers, since it took too long for the army’s laundry to come back.

“Since we had a lot of guys who considered themselves to be God’s gift to women, I found a way to pocket some extra money. Of course, the other guys would cover for me when I had a lot of pants to clean. (By the way, no underwear would I clean.) I used GI soap. The courtyard had a long wash trough, and the lady nearby had four flat irons I could heat on our fireplace. For her help, we kept her in sugar, candy, soap, etc.”

Jack also took time off during his stay in England to have his tonsils removed. “This was performed under a local anesthetic at an Army hospital maybe 25 miles away,” he recalls. “I held the pan while the doctor cut them out. Then, after two days I was given a choice of doing KP at the hospital or going back to my outfit. I chose the latter.”

According to The Maverick Outfit, life at Bridgwater helped mold the outfit into a family of sorts. Since a training schedule didn’t exist, after breakfast the men went to their respective motor pools and worked on the new half-tracks that had been delivered to England.

James Black and Frank Basil, both members
of Jack's gun crew, load 37mm canon rounds.

The wide use of aircraft in World War II led to related developments in anti-aircraft weapons. The half-tracks used by the 474^th were one of those developments and were hybrid vehicles on which machine guns were mounted, transported and fired. The half-tracks were similar to pickup trucks or Jeeps in front, with a traditional pair of tires, Then, in back, instead of tires they sported tank tracking to allow them to move on a variety of terrain.⁹

Guns mounted on the half-track Jack was assigned to included two 50-caliber machine guns, one mounted on each side of a central 37-millimeter machine gun. The 50-calibers weighed 54 to 100 pounds, could hit low-flying aircraft and could fire 400 to 500 rounds per minute. It used ball and tracer armor-piercing ammunition. In comparison, the 37mm weighed 210 pounds, had an effective ceiling of 10,500 feet and fired 120 rounds per minute. It used larger, high-explosive ammunition with shell-destroying tracers.

Jack’s half-track gun crew included a sergeant and a driver in the cab and five guys in the turret:

• One operated the sites (which Jack says no one used).
• One fed the right 50-caliber machine gun.
• One fed the 37-mm and the left 50-caliber machine guns
• One sat on the left and traversed the gun turret.
• One—in this case, Jack—sat on the right, controlled gun elevations, fired the two 50-caliber guns simultaneously with one foot and fired the 37mm gun with the other foot.

A full side-view of a WWII half-track in action, camouflaged for winter.

For the 474^th and other similar units, the half-track vehicles would become their homes after the invasion, so much pre-invasion time was spent customizing them. Maneuvers gave the men a chance to try out the vehicles and determine what needed to be done. One improvement included welding racks onto the backs of the tracks to carry the gun crew’s barracks bags. But the Army had even more in mind:

One morning a truck came to the motor pool, and boxes were distributed to the crews. Inside each box were small pots and pans, a frying pan and a small two-burner gasoline stove. All of the utensils had collapsible handles and could be easily packed. These kitchen utensils were part of a new ration, called 10-in-1. Accompanying them was another box which had in it food for 10 meals, hence the name 10-in-1. The idea of these rations was to relieve the kitchen crew of supplying meals in the field as they had done in Tennessee. Each crew cooked its own and sometimes, in Europe, they would supplement the diet with the help of a cow or a deer who happened to come a bit too close to a hungry crew. The rations included such convenient items as powdered milk and eggs, cans of meat for the main course, little boxes of cereal which simply needed the addition of water to be made edible (the box served as a bowl) and, of course, coffee. On the day that the rations arrived, the men cooked their own lunch, on their own stoves at their respective tracks.¹⁰

Though this photo was taken after  D-Day
(notice swastikas indicating Jerry planes
shot down), it shows the half-track's "name"
of Any Gum Chum? The soldier pictured is
gun crew member Buck Haviland.

Jack adds that some 10-in-1 rations included a large can of English stew. “You only tried once to eat it,” he said. “It was a good trading item with the natives, if they were really hungry!”

Also during this time many of the gun crews began naming their half-tracks and painting the names on the sides. Jack’s gun crew dubbed their home away from home Any Gum Chum? after the phrase the American GIs heard so often from English children near where they were stationed.

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 Utah Beach landing

This passage from The Maverick Outfit best describes what happened next:

A view of Utah Beach from a landing craft on D-Day 

The beach was littered with dead and wounded debris. Stricklen met another soldier and they were proceeding to the sea wall, a concrete structure about 200 yards from the beach. It was over five feet high and paralleled the beach. It was a natural place to establish headquarters. Stricklen and the soldier congratulated each other for getting to shore. The soldier was one and a half yards from the colonel when a piece of shrapnel tore off the soldier’s arm. Stricklen carried his unconscious comrade to an aid station. After, Stricklen set up his command post at the sea wall. He dug a three-and-a-half foot deep foxhole and then excavated an area underneath the sea wall. Stricklen’s units then began arriving. By 8 a.m., 32, or half of the battalion's half-tracks, arrived. The first elements of the battalion ashore on D-Day were reconnaissance parties from A and B Batteries, consisting of the battery commanders and platoon sergeants, who landed from LCVPs [landing craft, vehicle and personnel] At H plus 60 minutes. [The rest of] A and B Batteries landed at H-hour plus four behind the Fourth Infantry Division. They landed with airborne machine gun crews. One platoon of C Battery landed late on D-Day, while the other platoon of C Battery, D Battery and Headquarters Battery landed from LSTs on D plus one.

Jack’s memory varies from this slightly. H-hour was 6:30 a.m., according to Ambrose, so H plus four would have been 10:30 a.m. “I remember something about our particular half-track and 9 a.m.,” Jack says.

Capt. Herlihy picks up from here:

As we approached the shore, I could see GI trucks all over. One, full of jerricans of gasoline, was a roaring fire. It was about 9 a.m. when I saw three bursts in a line about three seconds apart, and admired the clearing of the minefield. But the next burst was in a truck, which went all over the area in pieces, and I had seen my first of many artillery actions in combat. To lighten the load of my jeep in the soft sand, I walked ashore, and although people were all around, I felt alone and naked. Utah Beach was about 300 yards wide, in front of a swamp at least a mile wide, with roads to the interior only eight inches above water.¹⁹

US troops arrive at Utah Beach on D-Day.

Jack adds, “There were some soldiers in foxholes on the beach as we passed by, although they were standing up and not moving, with their helmets tilted forward. There was no lack of incoming mail from the enemy, but it wasn’t landing on the beach next to the ocean. The gun crews kept hidden in the turrets to avoid being hit by enemy fire. To get off the beach, we had to wait until a tank equipped with a bulldozer blade pushed sand up against the wall so that another tank equipped with a 75mm canon could position itself and destroy an anti-tank position nearby; so much for the enemy gun.”

Back to Herlihy:

Although the 4^th Division was by now several miles inland, we were getting considerable artillery fire. We raced for a four-foot sea wall at the crown of the beach, and found that the medics were already lining up dead Americans. I lay beside a tall, dead American and wondered what it was like when he came in. While we enlarged a hole we found, an ammo truck went up near us. We separated then, to look for the 16 gun positions and command posts. Since we had been landed about 1,000 yards south of the intended position, all our beautiful detailed sketches and maps (1 to 5,000 as I remember) were useless. As I roved I found myself all alone, and from the constant diving into holes, I found my carbine jammed with sand. Finally as I passed a tremendous pillbox which had been knocked out by naval gunfire, I heard a noise behind me. It turned out to be a German corpse, dislodged by a burst or by my footsteps, rolling down the side of the pillbox. Collecting my entrails, I moved on.²⁰

Herlihy goes on to say that four Focke-Wulf 190s, German aircraft, strafed them that day. Jack remembers “four came down low and four ended up even lower. One of the pilots bailed out and the paratroopers took out after him.”

If you weren’t a casualty that day, you were witness to many, as Herlihy attests:

On D-Day, about noon, we saw a flight of C-47s head inland a mile or two, and as they slowed for a drop, much 20mm fire burst all over the wings and fuselages of the big, low, lumbering planes. We saw several burn and blow up. Flaming parachutes trailed down as the paratroops tried to escape the massacre. We all cried. As we explored the area inland just behind the swamp, looking for better positions, we followed a dirt road, and at a turn faced a farmhouse. An American squad of 10 or more from the 4^th Division had done the same thing before, but had apparently been mowed down by a machine gun in a window, for they lay in a pile in a ditch next to the road. While I was by the sea wall waiting for Lt. Nevins, a P-47 sputtered overhead in trouble, then flames came from the motor and the pilot bailed out, but his chute never opened. The plane crashed with a great roar and explosion, 75 yards from our command post after turning away at the last minute.²⁰

“I clearly remember the P-47 pilot who was flying very low, his plane’s engine making a very loud noise,” Jack recalls. “He ejected but his chute didn’t open, and both crashed into the swampy flooded area.”

Along about 11 p.m., all of Stricklen’s units had arrived, and not one had been killed. Battalion records for June 7—D-Day Plus One—show another busy day for the boys:

• 9:30 a.m.—B Battery destroyed an enemy plane.
• 10 a.m.—A and B engaged about a half-dozen FW 190s, with A destroying one and B another.
• 6:50 p.m.—A destroyed two Me 109s.
• 6:55 p.m.—B engaged three more and destroyed one.
• 8:35 p.m.—C engaged eight FW 190s in a battle.
• 8:40 p.m.—A hit two out of six FW 190s, while B fought off two more.
• 10 p.m.—A and C engaged eight FW 190s, hitting two of them.

Already the 474^th was gaining a reputation, which would later be confirmed in the Stars and Stripes, a newspaper for soldiers, as “the First in the First.”²¹ 

This video juxtaposes how Utah Beach looks today (including memorials) with actual photos taken on D-Day:

On to St. Lo with the VII Corps

Gen. Omar Bradley,
"The Soldier's General"

Gen. Omar Bradley’s plan was to have the VIII Corps move 20 miles down the coast to the cathedral town of Coutances while the VII Corps moved toward St. Lo. With this accomplished, he expected all of his troops to be out of the marshlands and on firm ground where they could launch armor toward Avranches, the entrance to Brittany.

Once again attached to the VII Corps, the 474^th provided its supply line with ack-ack defense and engaged the Luftwaffe in six raids involving nine enemy planes on July 18-19 near St. Jean de Daye. The 474^th received credit for one Cat I and four Cat IIs, with four of them being Me 109s and one a FW 190.

July 15-20 the battalion’s mission was to defend the VII Corps field artillery of the 18^th and 188^th Field Artillery Groups. As the batteries moved toward St. Jean de Daye, they could tell that the 1^st Army was preparing for a big battle, with ordnance depots, hospitals and all manner of supplies spread along either side of the highway. Jack’s battery, A, ended up at La Nicollerie with the 91st Field Artillery.

The buildup they’d seen along the way, they would soon learn, was for a battle referred to as Cobra. Cobra called for a massive air bombardment on a narrow stretch along the Periers-St. Lo highway. Situated near Le Desert, just 3,000 yards way, most of the battalion had front-row seats for the action:

St. Lo

About 9 a.m. some of the men were watching a squadron of P-47s strafe, when they heard a rumble behind them. Turning around they saw three triangular formations of Flying Fortresses, and behind them as far as the eye could see were such formations. They seemed to go all the way back to England, as indeed they did. As the planes droned overhead at 8,000 feet, the men could see the bomb doors open, and then some could see with the naked eye the bombs falling while others watched with field glasses. German shrapnel came up to meet the planes, and the men could hear it whistling down around them as the bombardment went on. It was too entrancing a sight to leave.²⁶ 

The statistics were overwhelming:²⁷

• 1,500 Forts and Liberators led the raid, each carrying 40 to 100 bombs; enough to create 60,000 craters.
• 396 medium and 350 fighter bombs followed with 500-pound general purpose bombs and 260-pound fragmentation bombs.
• Planes bombed the 3.5-mile by 1.5-mile area with 5,000 tons of high-explosive, jellied gasoline and white phosphorous bombs for more than two hours.
• 111 Americans were killed and 490 wounded by “friendly fire” when bombs fell short.

 “I remember that day the American planes dropped the bombs and killed so many American soldiers,” Jack adds. “You never heard such a loud roar when the bombs started down. We didn’t know what to do. We finally ran for a nearby stone farmhouse that was unoccupied, and still we didn’t feel safe.”

From July 28 to July 31, A and B Batteries gave anti-aircraft protection to the 2^nd Armored Command Post, division trains and armored field artillery battalion, and the 62^nd Field Artillery, a 105 outfit. “As the day broke on July 30, hundreds of destroyed vehicles and wagons, innumerable dead horses, and the miscellaneous wreckage of defeat lay scattered over the countryside as the battle of the Cotentin ended,” The Maverick Outfit concludes.²⁸

But it wasn’t over yet. A and B Batteries reverted to battalion control. Some of the men dug in the half-tracks while others prepared foxholes, when just at twilight a lone German plane flew low over the battleground.

As soon as darkness arrived, a second German plane appeared and dropped a series of beautiful flares, which were misleading by their beauty because they always preceded an air raid. Sure enough, within minutes the air was filled with the rumble of many German bombers, and seconds later the dreaded whistle of falling bombs filled the air to be followed by the crash and roar of the explosions. It was like a Fourth of July celebration at the fairgrounds at home, what with the pretty flares and the noise of the explosions, except that everyone had to fight a feeling of panic and desire to get up and run, just run and run and run. But there was no place to run to, except to the nearest foxhole or, if this was filled, to find a little fold in the field. Some panicked and jumped out of the foxhole and ran across the field to a bridge abutment which was made of concrete and afforded more protection. But one couldn’t run as far as he would have liked to, because it was raining death. Most were content to clutch the dirt and didn’t care if several others were on top of him. They didn’t seem heavy…For an hour a dozen bombers combed the area. Through a minor miracle the road cleared of traffic just before the bombing began, and although it was pockmarked by anti-personnel bombs, none of the convoy troops was struck, although A Battery suffered several casualties…And strangely enough, with all their efforts, the Germans missed the bridges.²⁹  

The Three Faces of Jack: Cocky, Determined, Pensive

Although The Maverick Outfit gives the date as July 31, Jack’s Army discharge papers say July 29, and the diary of Dr. Louis Small, who checked the wound the next day, says July 28, this seems to be the same scene Jack describes when he explains how he was wounded. “It was sometime during these events that we were bombed and strafed by enemy planes at night. I was standing behind the half-track while two other fellows were firing at the planes. The Germans had dropped flares, and at times you could catch a reflection on the plane’s body. The enemy dropped several series of anti-personnel bombs, and a small piece of metal made a razor-like cut on my left hand—very superficial. When the medic came around in the morning, he treated it and put me in for a Purple Heart.

“We drove through the area several days later at maybe five miles per hour,” Jack continues, “but the dust hadn’t settled. There were huge craters, wrecked enemy tanks and plenty of junk. A complete elite Panzer division was destroyed. Stories were told of enemy troops walking around without weapons or helmets, wondering where they were.”

From July 20 through Aug. 25, the 474^th’s gun crews engaged the enemy in 11 raids involving 46 planes. Claims were submitted for the destruction of 11 and the possible destruction of six. Officially, the outfit received credit for 5.5 Cat Is and six Cat IIs. While with the 2^nd Armored Division, A and B Batteries had two raids involving seven aircraft, destroying two for sure and two others possibly.³⁰ 

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.”

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.”