Paratrooper ~ Vol. III
MY WORLD WAR II STORY
April 15, 1942 ~ December 14, 1946
© 1997 by Edward M. Isbell
507th Parachute Infantry Regiment
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Chapter 4
Sunday morning June 11, 1944.
The day started out quiet and peaceful. I had started on a journey that would be pure hell for eleven months! This is not to say that the past five days had not been!
I spotted a house and barn not far away, but things seemed to be too quiet around the house for me to approach it. My mouth and throat were dry, and I needed some water that I knew had not been poisoned, but not bad enough to get ambushed.
There were some cows in an apple orchard near by, and I checked their water trough, but it was more mud than water. I took my canteen cup and was going to try something I had never done~ milk a cow.
As I bent over beside the cow to try my luck, I saw a woman coming down the path from the house. I started toward her to ask if she had seen any American troops nearby and if I could get some water from the well. I guess she had been watching me from the house.
All at once she turned and started back up the path. I turned around and saw three Germans walking in our direction. They went through an opening in a hedgerow and settled down for a break on the other side. They must have been blind not to have seen me.
I crossed the field and worked my way slowly down the opposite side of the hedgerow from them toward the opening. As I moved along I tried to figure out the best thing to do. Taking them prisoners was out of the question. Should I go around them as if they didn't exist? They could kill me or some other trooper later.
I did not hate the German soldier, but he was the enemy and our job was to destroy them before they destroyed us. I had only two grenades left and they were concussion anti-tank grenades that were made of plastic explosive (Composition C) which was seven times more powerful than TNT. I threw one through the opening. It sounded like a bomb going off.
I knew that would bring more Germans, so I ran in the direction of the road I had been following, all the while expecting to see more Germans coming to investigate the grenade I had thrown. I took cover in a shallow ditch beside a hedgerow facing the road. I dug a small slit trench expecting artillery or bombers as there was a lot of traffic on the road.
During those three days I had marked German artillery, tanks, command posts and anything else that needed to be destroyed on my map. I was using my trench knife trying to make a hole to stick my head in if any artillery shells started coming my way.
The traffic on the road was moving toward the Merderet River. This road ran from Saint Mere Eglise north crossing the river and up the Cotentin Peninsula to the port of Cherbourg. Just as I thought, I could hear American artillery shells coming. The barrage came down back of me along the pasture and farm house and along the hedgerow I was beside.
I buried my head in the hole I had scratched out and prayed with all my heart that a shell didn't hit a tree and spray me with shrapnel. When it was over I was covered with dirt ~ and even though I had my ears covered with my hands and my mouth open ~ it was a day or two before my hearing got back to normal.
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I'm not sure what they were trying to hit, but I don't think it was the cows in the orchard or the farm house I had just left. I had been under several barrages by our Navy early in the week. Of all the bombing, strafing and artillery barrages, the Navy's big guns were the most frightening to me.
After the barrage I spotted a German 88 just across from me in a curve on the road. These gun emplacements were well protected by mines and booby traps. They were so concealed with natural growth it was hard to see them.
Then I saw two Germans appear on the road from nowhere. A few minutes later a truck came up the road and stopped on the curve. Several soldiers jumped off and the two standing on the road climbed on. The truck turned around and went back the way it had come. I knew it had to be a gun position. I had marked several of these gun positions on my map that week.
I had good cover and could see anything that moved on the road. For about an hour everything got quiet. Nothing was moving, and then the sounds of battle broke out again down the road. I knew our troops couldn't be far away.
About 10 a.m. I heard something coming that sounded like a tank. It was a US reconnaissance half-track with a big star on its side. I wanted so bad to warn them of what was ahead, but there was no way. It was too late.
There were three half-tracks. The first two got by, but the last one got a direct hit from the 88mm that was in front of me. One of the men was thrown from the half-track when it blew up. He got up and started running across the field in my direction, when two Germans from the 88mm crew came out and yelled for him to halt.
Just as they raised their rifles to shoot, I fired a few rounds and they hightailed it back to their position. The soldier had hit the ground. I didn't know if he had been injured when blown from the half-track and had passed out, or was trying to keep from being shot.
I waved and yelled for him to come on, but he didn't move. They didn't shoot at him and I was afraid if I tried going out and pulling him in the ditch it would get both of us killed. They kept me penned down with rifle fire for several minutes before things got quiet. They weren't worried about me as much as they were about what might be coming down the road.
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The first two half-tracks got into trouble on up the road. Some of the soldiers that were in them were captured and brought where we were. I was praying that our troops would be coming up the road any minute and destroy the 88.
An hour went by and nothing happened. By this time I was sure they had the area covered around me and it would be only a matter of time before they would make their move. I had no choice but to stay put and pray. I buried my radio and waited.
I watched the soldier lying in the field wounded or dead.
He had not moved from where he fell. There wasn't much I could do to help him. Knowing that I was going to be killed or taken prisoner anyway, I thought of trying to surrender so the Germans could take him to a field hospital if he was still alive.
Not many troopers were captured the first few days of the invasion and I didn't think I would be captured. I waited, hoping for our troops to show up behind tanks come up the road.
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It wasn't long before I heard someone coming up the hedgerow. I raised to a crouching position on one knee when the brush parted a few yards in front of me and a German shouted, "Handy-ho, handy-ho" (hands up).
I said "Handy-ho, hell!" and fired point-blank at him, but the second time I pulled the trigger my rifle was jammed. The empty brass from the first shot had not extracted from the chamber. I hit the ground flat just as the Germans fired at me and rolled over on my side to retrieve my trench knife from my boot to pry the stuck brass out of the chamber. I would have surrendered at this point if I had known they weren't going to kill me.
They thought they had hit me when I flattened out on the ground and didn't shoot back, or they would have thrown a hand grenade to take care of me. Just a few moments later while I was trying to get the brass out, I felt something sticking me in the back. I looked up to see two Germans with fixed bayonets.
I remember saying, "Don't shoot," as I dropped my rifle and knife. They kept asking me if I was wounded. I told them no. I just knew they were going to shoot me. This all happened a lot faster than it took me to write these few remarks. They were surprised that I wasn't hit.
The soldier that I had fired at was bleeding from the mouth where a piece of his lip was missing. He must have turned his head to the side just as I fired. His buddies put a bandage on it to help stop the bleeding. He didn't seem to be mad, just scared and very white.
After they searched and disarmed me, they gave me all the tea to drink I wanted. They asked for my cigarettes. We sat there awhile smoking and trying to understand what the other was saying. They told me the officers would take everything from me when they got me back to their headquarters and all they wanted was my cigarettes ~ and I happily surrendered the few packs I had. We had another smoke before they took me to their headquarters.
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The Germans had started taking more troopers prisoner because they felt the peninsula soon would be cut off by our troops and then they would be the POWs. When they got me back to their headquarters, the officers did as the soldiers had predicted.
They stripped me of everything but my Testament. I was searched many times in the weeks to come and was always allowed to keep it. Most of the time they would say, "good book," and hand it back without looking inside. I kept most of my notes in the margins of the pages.
I didn't bury my map at the same time I buried the radio, hoping our troops would save my hide and I could turn it over to them. When the German officer found the map and saw so many of their positions marked on it, all hell broke loose! I thought he was going to shoot me, but a few licks across my head and back seemed to make him feel better.
In broken English, he called me a spy and a gangster. He also said he hated American paratroopers more than any other soldier. He asked me many questions about my outfit. He wanted to know when I had jumped, etc. All I could give him after each question was my name, rank, and serial number. Each time he would threaten to shoot me or give me a lick across the head.
One of the soldiers who had captured me came over with my rifle. He had just noticed that it was jammed and was trying to tell me their bolt-action rifle was better than our semi-automatic rifle. He broke it in half against a tree. He also realized that if my rifle had not jammed, both of us probably would have died on the spot. If I had killed him, I'm sure his buddies would have shot me.
The soldier who had been thrown from the half-track was brought in a few minutes later. He was still in shock and had a hole in his leg from a small piece of shrapnel. He was so shook up over losing his buddies that he was in a trance and not saying anything. They didn't get anything out of him.
There is no way to explain how he could have survived as there was little left of the other five men and the half-track. He told me that he was the radio operator and was located in the bottom of the half-track. I don't remember his name. He could speak fair German, so we all called him "Dutch" from then on. We were together for several weeks before being separated.
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After we were searched and interrogated, a soldier with a machine pistol marched Dutch and me up the road. We had to go by the half-track (or what was left of it). He told me the last thing he remembered just before they were hit, was that his buddy who was in the gun turret above him shouted, "Oh, my God!" Dutch thought that he must have seen the 88mm just before it fired.
He told me that our forces had set up headquarters in St. Mere Eglise the night before. This was about a mile from where we were at the time. We had to keep our hands on top of our heads as we walked along. The guard got mad about us talking, so we had to stop. We wondered if he had orders to shoot us somewhere up the road.
A little way up the road some high-ranking German officers came out of the bushes. They stopped us and started asking us the same old questions that had been asked earlier. The highest ranking officer, who looked like a general, couldn't speak English, but one of the other officers could. They were very friendly and knew the war wasn't going so well with them.
One of them asked us if we were frightened and I told him, "No!" trying to act brave. Of course we were scared to death. Who wouldn't have been? About that time we heard some shells coming, so we hit the ditch beside the road just in time. They exploded across the road a short distance away. When we got up, the officer who had done most of the talking was brushing himself off and said, "You kids might not be scared, but I damn sure am!" They laughed and went back into the thicket.
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We still weren't sure what they were going to do with us. I had not forgotten the troopers I saw hanging from trees and lying on the ground, who didn't have a chance to get out of their harnesses. They could have been taken prisoners, but the Germans killed many paratroopers the first few days of the invasion.
Some of them had been killed after they had been captured. Hitler had declared all airborne soldiers gangsters and spies. He had given orders not to capture them. We heard this many times over the radio from Axis Sal while at the air strip waiting for D-Day. All it did was make us fight even harder. And why not, if they were going to kill us anyway?
I must confess that not many Germans were taken prisoner by troopers. What could you do with them when we were fighting in small groups or alone? The largest group able to get together in our regiment was about 50 men that Colonel Millett assembled. He and most of them were captured or killed.
We continued up the road to a church. As we marched through the graveyard we couldn't help but notice the freshly dug graves. It wasn't a very good feeling to say the least. We found out later they were for French civilians and not soldiers. The Germans buried their dead and ours in foxholes or shallow graves.
Just after being captured, when they were taking me back to German headquarters, I saw a trooper who had been buried head down with only his boots showing. My first instinct was to grab his legs and pull him out. Those are some of the things that are still fresh in my mind.
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We were taken around back of the church where there was a group of captured troopers. The Germans gave us bread and butter. The bread was hard to get down even though I was hungry. Later I got a stomach ache. I don't know if it was the bread or nerves. Later I found out the bread had as much sawdust in it as it did wheat. In the months to follow it was the best thing we had to eat. We learned to love it.
That night they placed us in a barn where we stayed until June 15. There were about 200 troopers there, including Col. George V. Millett Jr., the commanding officer of our regiment. I was in the loft lying on some straw reading my Testament when someone kicked my foot. I looked up to see Colonel Millett. I hardly recognized him in the dim light and without his officer's insignia. Like most of us he had lost weight.
"Sergeant," he said, "do you have any of those blank passes that would get us out of this damn place?"
I laughed and told him the Germans took them, as well as everything else I had except my Testament. He was with us for two weeks or more before he told the Germans that he was a colonel. They placed him with other officers, who were kept separate from the enlisted men.
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On June 16, they moved us to another barn at Brickabeck where more troopers were being held. This was the first time I had seen any of the men in my company. I wish I could remember who they were, but at the time it didn't seem very important.
The Germans were being shelled, bombed and strafed continuously inside the peninsula from June 6 through June 20. They were holding us in barns trying to decide the best way to get us out of the peninsula and back to Germany. We were hoping our troops had the peninsula sealed off.
We were not worried about being held POWs for long. Our biggest concern was getting killed by our own forces ~ or whether the Germans would decide to kill us all. Our group had grown to about 800 enlisted men and 200 officers.
I found out later that the First Army commander, Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, made contact with the airborne divisions about June 10, 1944. On June 27 they started their move up the peninsula ~ before the peninsula was cut off ~ to capture the port of Cherbourg. On June 18 the Germans started us on a long march, hoping to get us through our lines and out of the peninsula without getting captured themselves.
With all this going on, would you believe that the Germans were able to get that many prisoners (over 1,000) out of the peninsula and back behind their lines in France?
They gave us a small loaf of bread and some stinking cheese. We walked all night, and at daylight they put us in a barn out of sight. Our fighter planes were strafing everything that moved. I can't remember what day it was, 19th or 20th, but I do remember it being cloudy and damp. I guess the Germans didn't think the planes would be flying because they had us on the move.
A German convoy was coming down the road and as they approached us, we had to move over to the side. Two American P-47 fighters came from nowhere. I don't know if the pilots recognized us as POWs or not, but they made a pass before they started bombing and strafing. This gave us time to reach a small church about 200 yards from the road we were on.
Somehow most of us managed to get inside. I was sitting on a staircase leading to a bell tower. The church was very old and each time a bomb hit close, it trembled and shook as if it was going to fall apart.
One of the officers in the group was a chaplain, and he prayed aloud throughout the raid. I couldn't see him from where I was, but could hear most every word he said except when the planes were making a pass.
A few bullets and debris hit the church, but no one was hurt in our group. When we came out of the church, all the trucks had been hit. Most of them burning. It wasn't a pretty sight with wounded German soldiers needing help and body parts along the road. We knew without any doubt that God had answered the chaplain's prayer for us.
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I think it was the next day that someone found a barrel full of wheat hidden under the barn we were in. We filled our pockets, not realizing that the wheat would swell in our stomachs and give us cramps and dysentery.
It was all I could do to keep going. I had stomach cramps and was carrying two belts of ammunition that a German guard had put on my back. I tried to get the guard to pass the ammo around, but all he did was laugh. We were hoping they would find a barn for us so we could get some rest, but we kept on moving. They were afraid our forces were going to catch up with us.
I didn't think I would be able to walk much farther. The ammunition was heavy and my stomach was getting worse. We were not sure what they did with the men who fell out. When a man fell out, a guard would fall out with him. Later a shot was fired and the guard would catch up with us. We never knew if they were shooting them or had a truck picking them up. Whatever, it made us think twice before falling out.
I asked the guard again to take the ammunition and he shook his head and acted as if he was going to hit me with his rifle. That made me so mad I threw the ammunition down. Then he hit me in the back with the rifle, knocking me to the pavement. He put his rifle to my head and threatened to shoot me. I tried to tell the SOB the best way I knew how, to go on and pull the trigger, because I wasn't going to move.
Everyone had stopped, even the officers in front of us. One of the officers who could speak German came back along with the German officer in charge to see what was going on. I told our interpreter that I wasn't going to walk another step carrying that damn ammo and they might as well shoot me now as later. Our interpreter relayed the message to the German officer.
The German officer grabbed the gun from the guard and told him he wasn't going to shoot anyone and that he, not the POWs, was to carry his own ammunition.
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We stopped for the day at the next barn we came to. When we realized that the Germans had slipped us past our lines and were headed for Saint Lo, it was too late, but we began seriously thinking of ways to escape. Knowing the guards didn't have an accurate count of the group, some of us thought it would be a good time to get lost.
We covered ourselves with straw in the loft of the barn, hoping the guards wouldn't miss us. But when time came to move out, the German officer announced that they were going to spray the straw with machine gun fire. Everyone got a good laugh as we wasted little time getting out of the loft. They sprayed the straw and any other place that someone could hide. They knew all the tricks.
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During the four days we were on the road, the only food we had was the cheese and bread they had given us at the start of the march. We ate leaves, grass, wheat and anything else we could find. The Germans didn’t feel as they had to account for us as long as we were not registered as POWs with the Red Cross.
They had no way of taking care of sick POWs on the move. They didn't have enough guards to leave with each man who fell out and they couldn't leave him for the French Underground to help him get back to our lines.
On June 21 the Germans got the people in a small French village to fix us soup. While we were waiting for the soup, Col. Millett and I climbed a fence to get to a small vegetable garden.
We were stuffing our shirts with onions when another POW grabbed the colonel by the neck, pulled him back and said, "Leave some for me." Of course the soldier didn't know he was talking to a colonel. The colonel and I laughed and went back into the barnyard.
They made the soup in a large black pot and put everything they could find in it. I don't know how good it would be today, but it was the best soup I had ever eaten. We only got one cup per man, but it was like a shot in the arm.
We hit the road again late that evening and walked all night. At daylight on June 22 we arrived at a French monastery that was being used as a transit camp for POWs being sent to Germany.
The POWs named it Starvation Hill. We received one small cup of soup and a piece of bread each day. I don't know how many POWs were there at any one time, but the Germans killed a cow or pig every day to make soup. If you were lucky you might get a small piece of meat in your soup. I think someone other than the prisoners were getting the meat.
The next day Colonel Millett and I helped the Germans kill a cow and a hog. They gave me the milk sac and Millett the hog's testicles (mountain oysters) for helping. He told me that mountain oysters were very good. I didn't know anyone ate them, or the milk sac either. We built a fire and put the sac on a wooden spit to roast. The longer it cooked, the smaller it got. We ate what was left, but it was stringy and tough.
The mountain oysters were not so bad, but anything is good that helps fill your stomach when you are starving. We never knew from day to day what we would get to eat, if anything.
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We had been on the road since the 19th of June. A guard told me we had traveled about 70 miles in the four days and three nights. He didn't know where we were going or what they were going to do with us.
This is when I first realized I would be listed as missing in action. I could see my mother and dad reading the telegram from the government. This bothered me more the next two months than anything else. I know ~ after having sons of my own ~ how they must have suffered not knowing if I was dead, wounded, captured, or if I would ever get back.
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