World War II Memories of
Wayne Bayles, U.S. Army, Ret.
 CO of  Co. "L" 359th

Part 1 of 5

I can assure you it wasn’t very funny at the time, but around the 18th of December 1944, I was designated to lead a patrol. Myself and three men were supposed to take a rubber boat, climb down the side of a mountain, cross the Sarre River, try to get across without drowning, and then go in two or three miles with a radio and just observe traffic. That was my whole mission - just to observe movement. They called this the Siegfried Line. It was the thickest part of the Siegfried Line. We hadn’t penetrated it yet. I was supposed to go back in there, report on movements, stay hidden of course and try to get back sometime. But fortunately the night before we were supposed to make the patrol they made a river crossing. A town named Dillingen was our objective. I never will forget we walked down to the river that night, I was the Executive Officer of K Company 359th Infantry and my job was to bring up the tail end of the column and make sure all the stragglers and everything would get there. So I was doing that and it was awfully dark, it wasn’t raining but everything was really muddy and nasty with some snow on the ground. We got down to the river, they had been crossing all night, other elements of it, and of course the Germans were shelling. Some of it was pretty heavy; we had taken a lot of casualties, especially amongst the engineers who were directing the river crossing. It was by assault boats, there were no bridges or anything, they were trying to get in a bridge but at this time the only thing they had were assault boats and we weren’t the first wave. We were the fourth or fifth wave but when they got down to the river the engineers were taking them across the swollen river, it was very high, and there was quite a bit of shelling as I said before. An assault boat crew usually consisted of two engineers who were trained to steer and row the thing and about six infantry guys who were only horsepower but it was really good if they had some experience in river crossing. Since I was bringing up the tail end of the company, I had ended up with about four or five raw recruits who had just arrived in the theater and none of them had ever made a river crossing before. We got down to the boat we were supposed to take and they only had one engineer, a raw kid, he could not have been over 18 or 19 years old. They only had a crew of one because they had had so many casualties. He was hurrying us up to get us into the boat and saying they had to go and come back and get one more load so we got into the boat and started rowing. We hadn’t gone very far of course in the rough water before we started going round. These guys that were rowing didn’t know how to row and the engineer was doing his best to keep the boat right but we started going round and round. I wasn’t sure if we were going to spill over into the river but thank goodness it wasn’t too long before we hit some land and as soon as we hit the land he ordered “Out, out I have to get back and get another load”. So the six of us hopped out, hit the land, and he headed back to the other side. We hadn’t gone more that fifteen yards until we realized we were on an island - we ran into more water. The sad part about it too was the fact that it was just beginning to get daylight and here we were sticking right out in the middle of the river. The Germans could see us easily. I hadn’t heard any small arms fire coming down but the artillery was still coming and I was sure they weren’t going to let us 5tand out on that island by ourselves. There was nothing we could do, we couldn’t communicate with anybody, we didn’t have any radios or anything. I knew we had to get off the island. So I told the guys “look I’ll go first but everybody grab each other by the belt, hold or real tight, hold your rifles above your head to try to keep them dry but don’t let go of the man in front of you and hang on”. Started walking and sure enough I thought every step I took was going to be the last one. The water was fairly swift and kept bumping up. It got up to my chest and finally got up to my chin and I knew we were going to drown. Then it started getting a little shallower and we walked out. Of course we were ringing wet all the way up to our necks and it was below freezing. We had about eight or nine hundred yards to go before we could get into any kind of shelter at all. Fortunately we didn’t get shot at at all. By the time we got to where we were going our clothes had frozen and we could hardly move. But we got inside, some of the people had gotten there before us and had already built a fire and we finally got to where we could take our clothes off, dry ourselves off with some towels we sat in the house and we dried our clothes out. About the middle at the afternoon we were back in pretty good shape. It was a strange area because we were in these row houses, they call them townhouses now I guess, we would be in one and the Germans would be in another. We finally got to where we would go up into the attic, knock a hole in the firewall, and drop a hand grenade down and run them out the other side hoping it wouldn’t come back and hit us. W kept working there until we finally got into the main town of Dillingen and it was a matter of pillbox after pillbox. It was quite a mess. When we got over there we took the town of Dillingen, had a lot of casualties, we were ready to hang on to it.    We were about half way through the Siegfried Line at that point and then the Battle of the Bulge started and Patton was afraid that the Germans would come down between the Sarre and Mozell Rivers and cut us off over there so he pulled us back across the river. I remember it must have been on the 23rd of December because on the 25th I remember very well we had a halfway descent Christmas dinner. But that night we loaded up in the trucks and took off for Belgium and that is when we got right in and help close up the gap in the Battle of the Bulge.

 Another little incident that happened I recall, it wasn’t funny at the time but it is funny now, I was a Corporal in M Company 117th Infantry. I would have had a squad, Corporals were normally squad leaders. But each platoon was authorized one Corporal that was called an Instrument Corporal and I took care of all of the range finders, aiming circles, and all that stuff and computed indirect fire problems for the machine guns in the section plus taking care of all the maps and that kind of stuff. When we would go out on a field problem they would usually just hook me onto a squad that was available. I didn’t take the instruments out usually on those small problems like that, so they would just hook me with whoever came along. I remember this one night we were supposed to make a dawn attack. We moved into position about midnight I guess and we were supposed to just sit there and wait until we got the word to move on. It was supposed to come at sometime before daylight the next morning. Well I can’t blame the people in the squad for what happened because I wasn’t a part of them; I was just tagging along the tail end. But I sat there and went to sleep. And when they moved out they (laughs) didn’t think about me, they just went on. But what woke me up was the sun shining in my eyes about 9:30 the next morning. I was way out in the middle of Fort Jackson reservation, all alone, not a soul there but me. I didn’t really know where I was. I did remember though that we had been traveling east and so I had to go back west. I didn’t know where or how far, but I knew I had to go west. When the sun was up I knew that that was east so I walked with the sun to my back. I must have walked a couple of miles until I came to a fairly decent paved road. I stopped and said, “well this road has to go somewhere, I don’t know where, but it goes somewhere”. Just about that time there was a medium size truck barreling down the road that had alot of 55 gallon drums on it that really smelled bad because it was the garbage truck. He stopped and asked where I was going and I said “Fort Jackson”. He said “that’s where I’m going too, I’m going after a load of slop from the mess halls down there. If you want a ride get in”. So I got in the truck and (laughs) it just so happened that when we pulled into the post and pulled in the main gate that that was right in my company area. Boy I knew I was in for some trouble, because that 1st Sergeant McKenzie was going to tear me up. When we drove up though it just so happened that my company was unloading off of the trucks that had brought them in from the problem. So I just got out of the truck, walked over, fell in and mingled in and no one had ever missed me. They didn’t know for months that I wasn’t there. I never told anybody until I went to O.C.S. in July 1942. I finally got around to telling somebody what had happened.

 

I don’t know if you’ve ever been afraid or not, but I mean scared. And if you’re really scared, that’s not funny. I remember, it must have been in September 1944, when I was picked to go on my first patrol after I had been assigned to Company K 359th Infantry. We had been in a position around a little town called Gravellote in France, which is outside Metz, and one of the old historic forts around Metz called Jeanne d’Arc or Joan of Arc. We had been in position there about two weeks or so and the Battalion Commander was interested in what was out in front of him and he said he wanted an officer-led patrol to go out that night. I was the junior one I had never been on a patrol and he thought that would be a good time to break me in. I got the three men that were going with me, we sat down and talked it all over, worked out our signals about what we were going to do and so forth. There was a quadrangle area that we were supposed to reconnoiter and find out what was out there. We had our plans laid out pretty well what we were going to do, the signals that we were going to do to each other and so forth. It was a diamond formation with me in the middle. We headed out and they knew if I wanted them to go right or left or stop, they knew exactly what to do. We hadn’t gone more than five or six hundred yards out to the front, not nearly as far as we were supposed to go, and it clouded over. It got so dark you just couldn’t tell where you were, which was good in a way because they couldn’t see you, but you couldn’t tell where you were or where you were going. It would lighten up a little every once in a while. We kept finagling along and all of a sudden the point man, or the one at the top of the diamond formation signaled for me to stop and signaled for me to come to where he was. I said, “What’s the matter?” He said, "I think there is a German guard up here”. I looked and sure enough there was a German soldier standing there. We had to go, we couldn’t stop just because there was a German soldier there. We still had to do our jobs, but I wanted to go up real slow and easy. we crept up a little at a time, trying not to give ourselves away. We got a little closer, a little closer, and he actually moved about three or four feet in one direction and then three or four feet in the other direction. I must have spent about 30 minutes working on this little deal. When I finally got up as close as I could, guess what? It was a fence post! He wasn’t moving at all, what was moving was my brain in my head. Of course the other guys thought he was a guard too. We got a big kick out of it later, it wasn’t funny at the time, but we decided later that that was pretty neat. But it got so dark, that we couldn’t find the spot that we were supposed to go to at all. We headed in that general direction and finally I gave up. I said if there was anything out there we would never be able to see it, so we’ll go back. What you worry about when you go on patrol is, when you come back in, that you don’t get shot by your own people. They are supposed to pass the word along to everybody that there is a patrol out in front of them and they should be very careful, but the word sometimes does not get to everybody. On the way back we were about 100 yards within our line when somebody got itchy and fired a flare. That thing hung up there in the air. We hit the ground of course like we were supposed to and tried to be real still, because movement is what gives you away more than anything else. It’s better just to freeze and not move at all. We made it back and went and reported to the Battalion Commander exactly what had happened and he said “Well son I accept that, I didn’t really think there was anything out there anyway”.

In my opinion, one of the most important positions on an infantry battalion staff was the Battalion S2 or the Intelligence Officer. We was supposed to keep you up to date on what is going on, especially friendly troops and, more importantly, the enemy. Where he is and what is he doing. If he is a good one he is worth his weight in gold. We had one, his name was Arthur Drake. He had been born in Germany and stayed in Germany until he was 16. But because of the fact that he was Jewish he left Germany when he was 16. He spoke the language fluently but not only that, the most important thing was he thought like they did and that helped us out so many times. He was one of my favorite people in the whole battalion. He was funny and comical. This incident I’m thinking about happened around the first part of April 1945. I saw that fellow again in the Pentagon in 1972. He was a full Colonel. I was a civilian at that time, I had gone with my boss up to the Chief of Signal Office for a meeting and this Colonel looked over at me, threw up his hand, and told everybody in the crowd “that man saved my life”. I didn’t believe that but I’ll tell you what happened. Patton had us going day and night, you’ve heard how he was and seen the movie. That was true. We had been going day and night and we were really tired. At that time I was commanding Company L 359th Infantry. We had finally moved into a little town and gotten it all cleared out, posted our guards around the building, and the rest of us were going to try to get some sleep. I had just fallen asleep when the radio operator woke me up. He said “Lieutenant, they want you on the radio”. So I got on the radio and it was Drake. He had started up to join the battalion with his staff of three or four people. They had run into a German patrol and over the radio he said he was completely surrounded. He was begging people to come and get him. He was calling Captain Evans who kept saying “I can’t hear you Drake, I can’t hear”. Well I heard perfectly clear, I knew what he wanted. It wasn’t really my place to go but finally I saw that no one else was going to go so I said “O.K. Drake I know about where you are, I’ll come and get you myself”. Well my people were so tired; I didn’t feel that I could ask anybody to do it. So I put the 300 radio on my own back and a couple of guys to go with me. We were going to sneak down there and see what we could find out. It was about half a mile, I guess, to the checkpoint that he had given me so I knew about where to find him. I expected to run into Germans all along the road.