Citizen Soldiers by Stephen E. Ambrose

Between explosions Gabel heard a yell, “Move!” It struck him as incongruous. He turned his head as best he could while pressing his body into the ground and saw “a captain running towards the rifle squad. ‘Get up!’ he yelled, his face contorted with rage. ‘Get up, you stupid bastards. You’ll die here. There’s no cover. Move! Move!’ He grabbed one soldier by the shoulder and kicked another. I had never seen that kind of rage. ‘Get ’em up, goddamn it!'”

Gabel was more than impressed: “The rockets seemed to lose their terror next to that captain. I did not know who he was and did not care. I jumped up and stumbled forward.” Others did the same. The platoon got to the far side of the open field. The men threw themselves down in a drainage ditch, exhausted.

“Fix bayonets!” Gabel felt the shock of the order jerk his body. “Fix bayonets? That is World War I stuff. Bayonets were for opening C-ration cans.” Not this day. All around Gabel, “there was the blood-freezing sound of fourteen bayonets drawn from scabbards and clicking home on their studs under the rifle barrels.”

“Let’s go,” the platoon leader called out. All fourteen men jumped out of the ditch, formed into a line of skirmishers, and moved towards the German position. They began shouting, “Geronimo!” Gabel screamed with the others. They got into the German lines. Enemy soldiers tried to lift their hands. Still yelling, the troopers thrust their bayonets into the Germans. They took the village. Their reward was that they got to spend the night in town,

One thing that kept many of those thrown into these early January attacks going was the thought of where they would spend the night, usually the next small village to the east. “It was something to live for,” Private Jack Ammons of the 90th Division remembered. If the GIs could drive the Germans from the houses before dark, it would be the GIs occupying the cellars, out of the wind. If Germans held the town, the GIs would spend the first hours of darkness digging foxholes in the wood nearest the village and the remainder of the night stomping in the foxhole to keep from freezing-and then move out on another attack in the morning.

It sometimes happened that the Germans occupied one set of cellars, the GIs the other. Occasionally they shared the same cellar. Private Schoo found three German soldiers sleeping on a cellar floor. Schoo got a couple of buddies, and they woke the Germans up. One could speak English. “We had them get wood for a fire, we heated food and coffee- we sat up all night talking, in the morning we took them back to HQ (they were nice guys).”

Another characteristic of the January fighting was the horror created by a high incidence of bodies crushed by tanks. Men slipped, tanks skid-ded. Wounded couldn’t get out of the way. Twenty-year-old Sergeant Dwayne Burns of the 82nd Airborne saw a fellow paratrooper who had been run over by a tank. “If it hadn’t been for the pair of legs and boots sticking out of all the gore, it would have been hard to tell what it was. I looked away and thought for sure that I was going to vomit. I just wanted to throw my weapon away and tell them I quit. No more, I just can’t take no more.”

But he had to, because the pressure from above was irresistible. The generals wanted results, so the colonels wanted results, so the men kept moving, no matter what.

Not all company commanders were willing to follow orders unques-tioningly. On one occasion two simply refused to carry out a direct order to attack. They were Captain Jay Prophet and Captain Harold Lein-baugh, commanding companies A and K of the 333rd Infantry Regiment, 84th Division. The morning after a night spent in a wood, under regular shelling, the battalion commander, a colonel, came to the front and ordered A and K companies to advance another half mile. Prophet refused. So did Leinbaugh. Prophet protested that all the weapons were frozen; the companies were at half strength; the men exhausted. The colonel threatened a court-martial. “Colonel,” Prophet replied, “there’s nothing I’d like more right now than a nice warm court-martial.”

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