Citizen Soldiers_ The U.S. Army from the - Stephen E. Ambrose [41]
Replacements were steadily coming onto the line from England. The new divisions were made up of the high school classes of 1942,1943, and 1944. The training these young men had gone through stateside was rigorous physically but severely short on the tactical and leadership challenges the junior officers would have to meet.
Paul Fussell was a twenty-year-old lieutenant in command of a rifle platoon in the 103rd Division. He found the six months' training in the States to be repetitious and unrealistic. In the field, "our stock-intrade was the elementary fire-and-flank manoeuvre hammered into us over and over at Benning. It was very simple. With half your platoon you establish a firing line to keep your enemy's heads down while you lead the other half around to the enemy's flank for a sudden surprise assault, preferably with bayonets and shouting. We all did grasp the idea," Fussell remembered, "but in combat it had one single defect, namely the difficulty, usually the impossibility, of knowing where your enemy's flank is. If you get up and go looking for it. you'll be killed." Nevertheless, Fussell saw the positive benefit to doing fire and movement over and over: "It did have the effect of persuading us that such an attack could be led successfully and that we were the people who could do it. That was good for our self-respect and our courage."
Fussell was a rich kid from southern California who had a couple of years of college and some professional journalism behind him. There were hundreds of young officers like Fussell, lieutenants who came into Europe in the fall of 1944 to take up the fighting. Bright kids. The quarterback on the championship high school football team. The president of his class. The chess champion. The lead in the class play. The wizard in the chemistry class. America was throwing her finest young men at the Germans.
AMONG THE fresh divisions was the 84th Infantry. It came into France on November 2, assigned to the new US Ninth Army, which had taken over a narrow part of the front. The 84th's K Company, 333rd Regiment, was outside Geilenkirchen, some twenty kilometres north of Aachen.
"K Company was an American mass-production item," one of its officers remarked, "fresh off the assembly line." It certainly was representative. There were men who could neither read nor write, along with privates from Yale and Harvard, class of 1946.
K company's first offensive was Operation Clipper. The 84th's mission was to seize the high ground east of Geilenkirchen along the Siegfried, in conjunction with a British offensive to the left (north). For Clipper the 84th was under the command of British general Brian Horrocks. To K
Company what that meant, mostly, was a daily rum ration, about half a canteen cup.
For the first three days of Clipper, K Company did the mopping up in Geilenkirchen, taking 100 prisoners with no casualties. The company congratulated itself and relaxed. "Someone was playing a piano," Private Jim Sterner remembered. He looked into a house and found a half-dozen men and his CO, Captain George Gieszl, playing the piano with a British lieutenant. The song was "Lili Marlene," and "our guys were laughing and singing along with him. What I remember most is a feeling of total exhilaration. Boy, this is really great the way a war ought to be."
On November 21 it was K Company's turn to lead the attack. Sherman tanks with British crews showed up to support the GIs. The company advanced. It took possession of a chateau the Germans had been using as an observation post but had not tried to defend. It moved forward again but was soon held up by artillery fire. Sergeant Keith Lance led his mortar squad forward to provide support, but as he approached, "we started taking machine-gun and rifle fire from a stone farm building off to our right." A British officer in a tank gave the farmhouse three quick rounds. Thirty