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Chapter 12
Between the Rivers
One of the things about an enemy army is that although they are in the same line
of work as our own, their policies, prejudices, and techniques differ from ours. [This is
also true of an allied army, but that's another story.]
As an example, consider their mess gear. The primary item in a German mess kit
was a sort of metal bowl as deep as an American canteen cup, obviously intended to hold
soup, or an occasional stew. The American "meat can" was broad and flat, more like a
plate, with sides maybe an inch high, suitable only for solid food, like meat, potatoes, and
a vegetable, or now and then some stew, called "slum gullion" by the troops, who mainly
detested it. Dessert could be served on the lid to the meat can. If anyone had tried feeding
American troops on soup, there might have been a riot, but I don't know, because I never
saw it attempted. C- and K-rations were bad enough.
Or take a different kind of for-instance. Somewhere in France, a local peasant
came to us with a complaint that one of our men had raped his wife, a sixtyish woman
with a graying moustache. He said it wouldn't have been so bad if she had been young
and charming, but she was too old for such foolishness.
A brief investigation showed that she really had been ravished, and that she could
identify her assailant. His battery commander wrote up charges and referred him to a
general court martial; I don't know the outcome, because we had to move on before the
trial was completed.
The peasant's comment, as translated, "If a German soldier, had done it, his
commander would have invited us to see him executed the next morning. "
In addition to our different eating habits and judicial procedures, German and
American tactics varied substantially. We were taught to fight for the "high ground"
whence we could see farther and either attack down hill or defend against an enemy
attacking up hill. The Germans seemed to be more interested in fighting for villages and
other areas with buildings. This made some sense, because most roads ran through
villages, and if you occupied the villages you controlled the road net.
But there was an even more cogent reason, as we had already found out in the
cold autumn rains during our six-week stay in the Gravelotte area, where we shivered in
our tents. There were houses in villages, and houses are warmer and drier than tents. So
by this stage of the war, we Americans had started to adopt the German strategy of
fighting for living accommodations. We even had a name for it: The Battle for the Billets.
Unfortunately, there was no practical way to fire a howitzer from inside a
building, so the cannoneers were condemned to work out in the weather. Even so, the
battery commanders started to look for positions near a building so that the men could be
brought inside in shifts to warm up and even to sleep if they weren't too far from their
howitzers.
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