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Hill 122
As I said, Pond and Beck made a great team. They both actually enjoyed fighting,
and together they used to clear out enemy machine gun nests, using pistols and hand
grenades.
The 3rd Bn team was a sharp contrast. The young major who had taken command
of it when I was with them died mysteriously while on a night visit to check his company
positions. (When I heard of this, I remembered thinking that PFC Forand had been over-
protective when he insisted on going with me when I went made my midnight trip back to
find the jeeps!) The missing major was replaced by a Captain J. F. Smith about the same
time Pond took over the 1st Bn.
The two were both highly successful commanders and speedily won promotions
to major and then lieutenant colonel. But they were quite different men: Pond's nickname
was "Fireball," Smith's was "Foxhole." Although no one questioned Smith's personal
courage, he didn't go in for the individual heroics that Pond did. He tended to position
himself far enough to the rear to keep track of the situation with all his companies, and to
control them. I didn't much like Smith personally - finding him arrogant and peremptory -
and at first neither did Captain J. D. (Rick) Richter, who had to work with him as liaison
officer. Later the two of them learned a mutual respect for each other, although they were
never as warm friends as Pond and Beck.
Rick was mis-cast as a LnO anyhow. In his mid-thirties, he was older than most
of us, and he walked with a round-shouldered slouch, emphasized by a pregnant look
from keeping a supply of tools and souvenirs tucked into the bloused front of his field
jacket. He was a mechanical near-genius, and the best motor officer we ever had until he
got kicked upstairs. Unlike Beck, he did not enjoy war: he yearned for it to be over, so he
could go back to his family in Texas. Where Beck swaggered, Richter shambled, with his
eyes on the ground, looking for something he could salvage and make into something
else. But when winter came, his two jeeps were the only ones in the European Theater
with heaters.
Another of his hobbies was talking with PsW. [Prisoner of war was officially
abbreviated PW. Most people used the plural form PWs, but the G-2 of the 90th Division,
Lt Col Boswell, was a purist. He felt that they were not prisoner of wars, but prisoners of
war. So within the 90th, they were designated "PsW."] Richter spoke German fairly well,
and being of German parentage, he felt it was his duty to point out to his misguided
cousins the foolishness of trying to fight against us vastly superior Americans with our
vastly superior weapons. The standard German army pistol fired a .38 caliber bullet; ours
was .45 caliber, considerably larger. He would illustrate the difference by pointing his
pistol at a PW and watch his eyes widen at the huge hole in the end of the muzzle. I
expect the poor terrified German's eyes widened mostly because he wasn't sure what Rick
intended to do with the pistol.
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