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Friendly Fire
Booth, a man who sometimes had a short fuse, swung on me and asked, "Do you
suppose your outfit can fire without it landing on my men?"
"I'm positive!" And I added for emphasis, "If it lands short, you can shoot me."
"OK," he said, "we'll give it a try."
While we waited for the initial rounds, I looked at the hedgerow our troops were
crouched behind. There were several tall trees growing out of it.
And sure enough, when the first salvo came, a round caught in one of the trees,
and burst right above the hedgerow. And-oh God-there was a call, "Aid man!"
I took my pistol out of its holster and handed it to Booth, grip foremost. "Go
ahead and shoot me," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he actually laughed. "That wouldn't
help much. Let's see if we can get the next bunch a little farther out."
A crisis came when a company of the 359th Infantry was under heavy attack in
one of those little hedgerow-bounded fields. The FO with them called for artillery fire to
silence some pesky machine guns, and just as we fired for effect, a whole cascade of fire
came in on their field, so effectively that they pulled back to reorganize. The infantry
battalion commander was livid with rage, and he made an official complaint.
Lt Col Costain felt sure that it was German fire, perhaps deliberately timed to
coincide with ours. He ordered someone [I
don't remember who, but think it was either
Capt Richter, the liaison officer, or Lt Wright, the survey officer], to go into that field
after dark and see if he could get a back azimuth (direction they came from) by
examining the shell craters.
I don't think Costain realized at the time that our troops had withdrawn from the
place, or he might have hesitated to give the order. However, the officer assigned the job
went out and found (1) that the enemy had not occupied the field after our people pulled
back, (2) that the craters were round, like the craters of an infantry mortar shell, not bat-
shaped like that of an artillery shell, so that it was hard to tell what direction they came
from, and that (3) a nose cone he dug up bore markings in German. The fire in question
had come from German 120mm mortars, not from American 105mm howitzers.
Presented with the evidence, the CO of the infantry battalion apologized, then
turned his anger toward his own troops. They had been shown up by an artillery officer
who had guts enough to go alone past the front lines, into a field his men had found too
dangerous to hold. He ordered the company to get back up where they belonged,
immediately if not yesterday.
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