World War II Memories of
Wayne Bayles, U.S. Army, Ret.
CO of Co. "L" 359th
Part 3 of 5
Two military operations that I was always afraid of as a young fellow were an attack on a fortified position and river crossings. To me those were the most dangerous of all of them. I really sweated them out. We had some of all of it, mostly river crossings. One that we always sweated out the most was someday we had to cross the Rhine. I thought about that even when we were in OCS (Officer Candidate School). The Rhine River really could be a booger, but, with the way things happened I walked across the Rhine River on a footbridge. I didn’t have to row a boat and didn’t have to fire a shot. What this little tale is all about though, the main thing I wanted to remember, was the fact that after we crossed the bridge, on foot, single column, the whole infantry company, we made a left hand turn when we hit the land and were marching up sort of parallel with the river and going to this little town which had already been cleared out, I believe by the 4th Armored Division. But anyway, we were headed up that way and an ME-l09 fighter plane cane buzzing over the top of us and I thought he was going to shoot. He didn’t but there was a long straight stretch of land in front of us, no trees or anything, and this guy made a perfect belly landing out in front of us. We watched him, as soon as the plane stopped he jumped out and ran into the edge of the nearest little town which was only two or three hundred yards. He didn’t bother to take his parachute off, he was running with that thing banging on the back of his legs. I went on up, I wanted to see the plane. I looked and boy it was a beautiful thing. It hardly had a scratch on it. He didn’t even tear it up when he landed it on it’s belly, it was a wheels up landing. I was also interested in what happened to him when he ran into the edge of town. He dropped his parachute, and lumped on a bicycle and took off, so I don’t know what ever happened to him. But I was interested in that parachute. When I got up there, I picked it up and man it was a honey. It just fit me to a tee, the right size. I really wanted that parachute, it was the quick release kind, the kind you just hit a button in front of you and the straps flew out. It was a good over-water release. I picked that thing up and man I lugged it and finally got a chance to put it on my jeep. I kept it on the jeep until I had a chance to pack it and L mailed it home. It got home all right, my wife told me that she had received it. She had it laying in the living room and this little turkey, Morgan McDonald, he ended up being a drummer in Peewee King’s band, a good friend of Wilma and Annie Jo. He was over, he was a little bit too young to be in the Army, and Wilma was showing him the parachute and some other stuff I had sent and he said “here’s how you do that” and he grabbed hold of the rip cord, the dummy, and dumped it right in the middle of the floor. It was just scattered all over the floor Wilma told me. She scooped it all up and put it in a box and somehow it ended up at my aunt’s house, in the attic. I understand that a couple of years later she made doll clothes out of that silk and that really screwed That parachute up for a fare thee well. I wanted that thing really bad. Of course it would be too little for me now but at the time it was a perfect fit.
I remember one time when I was serving with an advisory team to the Chinese in Formosa and I had a monkey for a pet. I had gotten it to have so when the kids came over I would have a monkey for them. It had gotten loose from me a couple of times, he would break his chain and go to a tree. 1 the way you catch a monkey when they get away from you is to go get a dog. They love dogs and they will come down to where they are to play with the dog and you can just nick them up. It did that two or three times until the chain got so short that I had to have a new chain. I had a jeep driver, his name was Ling. He and I got along pretty good, we could go some places together without an interpreter. Not a lot, we couldn’t do any business, but he and I got along pretty good. I said to him one day “Ling, you know monkey?” He said “Huh, Huh, yeah monkey, monkey. Yeah capitan that”. I said “O.K., I want to go get a chain, the monkey has broken his chain and I need to go downtown. Do you know where I can get a chain?” I used my hands and put them around my neck. He put his hands up to his neck and said “yeah, O.K., monkey, yeah. Go get jeepo.” So we went and got the jeep, went downtown and he pulled up in front of a dry goods store. I said “wait Ling, I want a chain for monkey”. He said O.K. and I thought he knew this town better than I do. I thought we would probably go through the store and there would be a junkyard out in back. They had these little lean—to places where guys would sell strange things. But I thought he knew what he was doing. So he led me into the store, but instead of going on through, he led me over to a counter that was full of neckties. He thought I had wanted to buy a necktie for myself. You can never tell what people are thinking when. you are talking to them, you have to be real careful.
Shortly after we had first went to Fort Jackson, all of us were very green, we had had some National Guard drill and lectures, but that was all. We were all green as grass wnen it comes to soldiering. But I remember the first time I was on guard duty. I had learned my General Orders, or at least I thought, as well as anyone else. I went on guard duty. My post ran up and down a line that ran between the tents that We were sleeping in and the row of latrines. Every company had a latrine assigned to them. That is where my post was and as far as I was concerned, when taps blew, everybody was supposed to go to bed. So I was walking my post and here came old Newman. (laughs) There were two brothers in our company by the name ol Newman. It was the oldest one, he came charging across, he ran out of his tent, and started crossing my post and I challenged him. I made him stop and said “where in the world do you think you are going?” And he said “I’ve got to go to the bathroom”. I said “oh no you don’t, you get back in tihat tent.” He got back in his tent and I kept walking. A little bit later on I saw him way on down the other end of the battalion area, sneaking across over to the latrine. Well I’ve learned now, since then, that the General Orders say “take charge of this post and all government property in view, walk my post in a military manner keeping always on the alert and observing everything that takes place within sight or hearing, and allow no one to pass without proper authority”. What I thought it said was allow no one to pass. I’ve grown up, I was only 18 then, and I’ve learned that he had the authority to go to the bathroom.
Those old forts around the city of Metz were part of the Maginot line and had been there for a long time - two or three wars. We were outside this one called Jeanne d’Arc or Joan of Arc, which was supposedly one of the toughest one of the five that were located there. And they tried everyway to penetrate those things. I remember one day two P-47 fighter planes flew over with a five hundred pound bomb under each wing. They were making diving runs at that fort. I saw this one P—47 that made a dive and one of its bombs released and headed for the target. The other one released but it only released on one end. When the plane started to pull up out of the dive the bomb was still hanging there on one end. Eventually it turned loose and it headed right straight back toward us. It landed about fifty yards from one of my outposts and it put a hole in the ground, it had a delayed fuse on it, that you could have buried a two and one-half ton truck in easily. It threw dirt all over everybody but fortunately no one was hurt.
When you’re scared you forget about being hungry. Food was kind of hard to come by and hard to keep to us. We spent alot of time eating what was called back in those days K rations. Which was a meal in a box, preserved, with a little variety. Not very much, but it was cheese everyday for dinner, I remember that. But they were nutritious and easy to carry. When things got kind of quiet, more or less, the guys would start to get hungry and you never have seen the ingenuity of American soldiers, they can come up with more things than you can shake a stick at. I know during the fall we had a lot of trench fries because lust about every German house that we went into had a basement full of potatoes. The only problem we had was grease. That is where the ingenuity of the G.I.’s would come in. You would see sometimes they would have something in their pack and you would wonder what in the world it was. You would look and it would be a quart of grease that they had managed to come up with somewhere. We always had the potatoes but the grease was hard to come by but they would manage. The army had substitute butter back in those days. It wasn’t margarine because margarine would melt. This stuff would not melt. We tried to make french fries in it but there was no way, we even put a blow torch to a pan and put it in there but it would just slide around in there, it never would melt. But the guys would always come up with some grease someway or another. I remember one day looking out the window of this building that we were in and I see two of my guys leading a cow down the Street. I said “what in the world is going on, they’re leading a cow down the street?” Well I didn’t pay too much attention to it I thought she had gotten in their way or something. About a couple of hours later, here came a guy with one of the nicest steaks you have ever seen in your life, he brought me a steak. It turns out this fellow had been a butcher and when he saw that cow, he also found a butcher shop in this little town that we were in. (laughs) They butchered that cow and boy we had steak around there for a couple of days.
On April 7, 1945 I had a shrapnel wound in my right arm and was hospitalized until about the middle of July. When I went back to my outfit, of course the war had ended, and they were located in Graffenwahr, Germany. The 90th Division headquarters was located in Weiden, the 359th Infantry regimental headquarters was located in Amburg, and my 3rd Battalion was stationed in Graffenwahr. Graffenwahr was, and still is, a training center. The Germans used it for training artillery people because they had alot of range area. It was a small town, as far as population of the town was concerned, but a real fine training area. The British had bombed it pretty heavy but my outfit, while I was still in the hospital, had gone in and occupied the barracks. Some of the roofs had been blown off. They would take the roof off of one that didn’t get hit and put it on the other one. Then they patched it all up and we had a real nice area to live in. The Battalions in the Division were scattered out all over that part of Germany. The Division Commander had expressed a desire to be able to fly around to all the Battalions and visit them by using one of his little artillery observation airplanes. So he put out a directive that everybody would have some kind of an airfield. Most of those planes were J3’s, piper cubs, and could land on not too long of a runway. But the Division Commander wanted to be able to fly around to all of these different spots. The Battalion Commander called me and said “Wayne, you used to do some flying. Do you know anything about building airports?” (laughs) I said, “no, I have never tried to build one, but I know what you need”. And he said “O.K., it’s yours. I want you to make an airport available to the Division Commander so he can fly in and see us every once in a while.” So I started looking, I got in the jeep and drove all over that reservation. Of course an infantry battalion, like us, didn’t have any construction equipment. We had a few shovels but that was about it. I had to find a place that wouldn’t require any extensive work because we didn’t have the equipment to do it with. And that reservation was full of holes, tank traps, artillery holes, and every kind of obstacle you could think of. I could riot, on that reservation, find a place big enough to land a J-3. But I kept looking and I found, just outside the post, (right adjacent to the military post), a big field of wheat. But it wasn’t quite ripe yet. This was at the end of the war and we pretty much had our say of what we did. So I said O.K., that is where I’m going to put the airfield and I couldn’t wait for that wheat to get ripe. But how in the world am I going to cut 5 acres, I guess, of wheat with just sickles? I thought we may be able to scratch up a few sickles. I was talking about this one day and one of my guys was a farmer and he said “well Lieutenant I know where there is a horse drawn mower downtown. I saw it one day sitting in one of the garages down there. We could take that thing up there and use the jeep instead of a horse. We, could cut that wheat for you.” So we did, he went downtown with the jeep, pulled that lawn mower, a two horse mower with a long blade, and they began to cut the wheat using the jeep. Well, of course, when the wheat started to fall, right away the civilians raised cain because they knew that was their food. So they came up and asked if they could gather up the wheat. I was glad of that because they raked up the straw for me and they were gleaning the heads off of that wheat. It was almost ripe, I guess they had some way that they salvaged part of it, but anyway the main point is that we used a mower to cut the wheat down. That was great, we had plenty of room, a good nice smooth area for the planes to come in and land. I found a paint place downtown and they made me up some black and orange paint and I made some markers to go along the edge of the field so that they could be seen from the air pretty well. I thought “well, we need a telephone line out there”, because when somebody comes in, they need to call and tell us to send a jeep out to pick them up. So the battalion communications section ran a EE8 telephone line out there and that worked fine. I said, “Well, we need an operations shed, where are we going to get an operations shed to put that telephone in?” (laughs) If you have ever been to Germany or Europe, you’ll know that every railroad crossing has a barrier that went across the railroad, I imagine now they are electrical, but back in those days you let them down by hand, and they always had a little shed there that the man stayed in. When the train was coming he would go out and roll the barrier down. There was one right in Graffenwahr. We didn’t have a truck, or anything, to lift that thing up but we were going to take it. We tied a steel cable around it and drug it right down the highway from the railroad crossing, probably half a mile, to the little airstrip we were building. Fine, it didn’t tear it up, damaged the road a little bit where some of the spikes were dragging in the asphalt but we got the shed out and put the telephone line in it, had a battery operated light that we left out there so that if we needed anything in the nighttime it would be there. Nobody bothered it, nobody bothered the telephone and we were in business. There was a plane circling around and I could tell he was looking our airport over. Then he came in and landed, it was an L—5. I went running over to talk to the pilot. I said “could you see our field up there?” He said “oh yeah, you can see it a long way, it is laid out right, the right direction for the prevailing winds, but I don’t like the signs that you put along the edge to mark the runway but we’ll take care of that.” I said “what do you mean you’ll take care of that?” He said they were from a corps artillery outfit and they were moving in to take charge of that post. (laughs) So that meant he took over my airfield too. The main point is the Division Commander did fly in one time and used it. But the airport then was being used by a corps artillery outfit, who had alot more airplanes than we had and it worked real good, but they took charge of it. That airport is still in operation today. They extended the runways, paved it, built a big operations office, but 50 years later that airport is still being used today.
I’ve been asked alot of times, especially by kids, “Mr. Wayne, did you ever kill anybody?” Well that is a hard question to answer because I’m against killing and I was in the Army and they were going to try to kill me if I didn’t kill them. I did shoot several times at people individually but that wasn’t my job. I was a platoon leader and a company commander and my troops killed alot of them. But I personally can’t say that I know for sure that I ever killed one. I fired artillery alot of times that killed them, but for me just to pull a gun out and shoot one, I can’t say that I ever did. One little incident that I recall that I am kind of proud of is the fact that I think I saved a German man’s life. You’ll remember that during the Battle of the Bulge how cloudy and overcast it stayed for several days. I remember the first morning that the clouds lifted. We had had a real rough 2 or 3 days and it was extremely cold. Several of my men had frozen parts, especially their feet. I remember that last night it was so extremely cold and I had been up most of the night. I had finally got to sleep for a little bit and sometime, about 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning, I guess, we were sitting still and one of The fellas woke me up and said “Lieutenant, I think you should come up here and look at this.” So I got up and went up to the position that he was talking about and he said there was a German soldier laying out there in the field. There was a little undergrowth, not much, it was mostly open, but he said “we’ve been watching him for about half an hour and we don’t know if he is dead or not.” I took my field glasses and looked and sure enough about 250 or 300 yards there was a German soldier laying out there. I took my field glasses and I could see by looking through them that there was just a little bit of movement. I saw him move his hand a little bit, so I knew he was alive but I didn’t know if he was playing opossum or what. I thought we would watch him for a little while. We watched him for about 15 or 20 minutes and he didn’t make any movement to do anything so I thought if this fella is hurt we should try to help him. I got one of the other fellas there, we picked up a litter, left our weapons, and took the first aid man’s helmet that had a Red Cross painted on the side of it and he and I went out to check this guy over. I had gotten 4 or 5 riflemen lined up in good spots there though to cover us in case we ran into any trouble. They could start shooting and doing whatever they could to help us get back. We went out with no problem and got to him and I could see that he was still alive. I tell you he was frozen, there is no doubt in my mind, and he was stiff as a board. We could tell that he had been wounded so we picked him up and laid him on the stretcher and started back in. He was heavy, I wasn’t very big in those days, and we struggled along. We had to take one break or so and we were afraid we were going to get shot at, but we thought it was worth a chance. We got him back in, we got behind the line, and made him a cup of coffee. Of course he was in such bad shape that we almost had to force him to drink the coffee. We did thaw him out enough to get him to where he could talk a little bit. A couple of the fellas there could speak some pretty decent German so they were talking to him and we were kind of chiding him alone and we finally got him to condemn Hitler. There was a tank there that had to head back to their line to get some maintenance done on it so we loaded the stretcher, with him on it, on top of the tank, and strapped it down so he wouldn’t fall off. The last I saw, they were headed back toward the rear with him hanging up there. I’ve always wondered if he made it, I sure hope he did.