Another River, Another Town A Teenage Tank Gunner Comes of Age in Combat-1945

CHAPTER 1 THE EDUCATION OF A HERO The German breakthrough in the Ardennes forest in France in December of 1944 and January of 1945 created a "bulge" extending into Allied positions. In the ensuing battle, one of the most horrendous and costly conflicts in the European theater in World War IIthe Battle of the Bulgethe Allies lost enormous quantities of equipment, men, and supplies. The need to pursue the now retreating Germans required massive replacements of equipment and, especially, men. There was no way the war could continue without them. At that very moment, I was being preparedalong with tens of thousands of other GIsto help supply the need. I had found my heroic destiny in armored warfare, and my training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, resulted in my qualifying best as a "medium tank gunner." I was a normal teenager, just eighteen, naive, ignorant, fully absorbed in myself, and quite certain that I knew all I needed to know about the worldin fact, next to nothingand was invulnerable to such subtleties as death and destruction. My education about the war was pretty much limited to the Why We Fight indoctrination films we were required to watch in basic training. Those films filled me with adolescent hostility toward Adolf Hitler and his armies, whose satanic goal, we were assured, was to conquer the world and make slaves of us all. I was a griping-good soldier and wanted more than anything to go to Germany, find Hitler, and relieve the world of that monster once and for all. Not all the trainees I associated with shared my zeal; in fact, lots of guys were finding ingenious ways to avoid shipping out to the ETO (European Theater of Operations). Most of them were draftees. I, on the other hand, had enlisted, primarily to avoid finishing high school, which I detested. Surely war was preferable to high school! I had as good a training at Fort Knox as nineteen weeks (including two weeks of gunnery school) would permit, and by the time I arrived in Europe, I had received the corporal stripes that went with being a gunner. I had the romantic idea that in some sense war was glorious. But the devastation I saw in France, Belgium, and Germany was so nearly total in places that my illusions began to fade. A lot of boys became men in those first days, though some of us held on to our heroic fantasies, our dramatic dreams of doing great things in battle. We rode across France and Belgium in "40-and-8s" of World War I vintage and ended up in the tangle of destruction in Germany called Stolberg. At Stolberg we were detained in a replacement depot (or "repple-depple") situated in a former chain factory. Our private quarters consisted of whatever vacant spots we could find on the filthy floor. The air was choked with the smoke of burning shoe impregnate, which was considered more valuable as a source of heat than as protection of shoes and feet against mustard gas. And everywhere, of course, were the countless barracks bags and other equipment the men were responsible for. I saw no glory here! But it was here that we were, without our knowledge or consent, assigned to various line outfits, our combat units. I did not know what my assignment would be when we finally convoyed out of Stolberg into the vast unknown of combat warfare. I still remember the tingle of excitement I felt as we traveled across the wreckage-strewn countryside. The carcasses of tanks, trucks, half-tracks, even planes, gave us some impression of what lay ahead for us. One of the remarkable things about combat life is the almost total and perpetual blindness of individual soldiers when it comes to the matters that most immediately affect them. We never knew what was going on, where we were going, what we would be doing, or, of course, what the outcome would be. We thought weIrwin, John P. is the author of 'Another River, Another Town A Teenage Tank Gunner Comes of Age in Combat-1945', published 2002 under ISBN 9780375507755 and ISBN 0375507752.