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Upstarts
What had happened was that the Germans had counterattacked about 3:00 a.m.,
retaken Kerling, and were threatening to drive the whole 359th Infantry back into the
flooded river. Don Thomson always claimed that the action was practically over by the time I
arrived, but it seemed to me that there was still plenty going on up to noon, when things
slacked off enough so the FDC personnel could get dinner in shifts.
"Why in hell didn't you send somebody to wake me?" I asked Thomson when there
was a chance to get a word in edgewise.
"Didn't have time!"
It was that evening when somebody - T/4 Devlin, I think - pointed out that tomorrow
would be Armistice Day. [Now called Veteran's Day, the 11th of November then celebrated
the armistice that ended WW I, and it was the custom to observe a minute of silence at 11:00
a. m., the hour it took effect.] "Will we have a minute of silence?" he asked.
"I suppose we will," I said, "although at a time like this, it seems pretty silly to be
celebrating last war's armistice. It sure didn't last long!"
However, I was wrong again. The next day, though not as frantic as this one, was
plenty busy, and it was noon before I noticed that we had been firing up a storm all through
the mystic hour of eleven. But by midnight, things seemed to have stabilized a little in the
bridgehead area, although most of Kerling was still in German hands. A bridge had been
completed and was ready for at least partial use. The 359th Rgt Forward CP (Unique
Forward) crossed the river and set up in the village of Petite Hettange where it could be close
to the fighting battalions. Somehow a telephone cable had been laid across the bottom of the
river, so there was now one line to Unique Forward. Maybe the bridgehead was safe now,
and we could look forward to breaking through the enemy defenses.
Not yet.
Just before daylight, the Germans launched a counterattack that made the first one
look like a dress rehearsal. With infantry and tanks, they drove forward out of Kerling in all
directions, but primarily down the road toward Petite Hettange, where they eventually got
within the length of a football field from the village and the regimental CP. War From the
Ground Up, the latest history of the 90th Division, says on pp 296-297 that one of our battery
commanders was acting as liaison at the Unique Forward CP and that he relayed fire
missions back to us on the one telephone line. I must have known about this at the time, but I
have completely forgotten about it. I don't even remember which battery commander it was,
but any of them - John Klas, Bob Wilson, or Lew Fauble - could have handled it.
All I remember is standing beside the map/firing chart with a field telephone in each
hand. T/4 Harris stuck a pin in the map to indicate the location of each fire mission, and he
was supposed to take it out at the end of the mission, but I suspect that in the confusion and
time press some got left in. Anyhow, the chart looked like a porcupine by mid-morning.
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