 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Oscar Drake
When I first met Lt Oscar Drake, I was mildly surprised at his having such an
English-sounding name when he looked like an Italian. Then he spoke, and I was
astounded: his German accent was thicker than Henry Kissinger's. I later learned that he
was a German Jew, anxious to help overthrow the Nazis who had driven him from his
native land. And that he was to become a Legend.
Drake was the S-2 of the 3rd Battalion, 359th Infantry Regiment (3d Bn, 359th
Inf). His primary job was to find out as much as he could about the enemy situation in his
battalion's immediate front. His fluency in German, which surely must have been better
than his English, helped him a lot, as I'll explain later.
The occasion of our meeting was when I arrived to act as liaison officer between
my own outfit, the 915th Field Artillery Battalion (915th FA Bn) and the 3d of the 359th.
It was not my regular job, but the real liaison officer had been wounded, and I was a stop-
gap until he could be adequately replaced.
Things were pretty confused at the 3rd Battalion when I got there. They had only
been in the shooting war for a few days, but the battalion commander had been wounded
at the same time as our liaison officer. His replacement was an unprepossessing little Lt
Col who seemed to me far too old for the job (he must have been fifty). He had so
recently come to the battalion that he didn't even know the names of his staff officers, one
of whom, the S-3, was as new to the job as he.
Lt Drake took me under his wing, and the following morning I went with him to
what they called the battalion observation post (OP), which was a funny term, because
you couldn't observe much of anything from there. Or from anywhere else, for that
matter. We were still in Normandy hedgerow country, and the entire landscape was
divided into irregular fields of a half-acre or so fenced off with hedgerows - earthen
embankments with trees and brambles growing on their tops, so that one could rarely see
beyond the next field.
Actually this OP was a forward command post, from which the battalion
commander was supposed to direct the battle, with some help from his S-3. In fact,
neither of those two was there, and Lt Drake commanded the battalion the first day,
sending orders by radio and runner to the company commanders, all of whom outranked
him. But nobody complained.
Sometime that night they got another new battalion commander, a competent
young major, and next day he took over, leaving Drake the opportunity to do his own
work.
And that included saving a life.
Here's how it happened. Late in the afternoon of the second day, our leading
company got pinned down by enemy machine gun fire as they tried to cross a road. The
battalion commander brought all his "OP" group (including Lt Drake and me) up to the
road to see what was going on. About the time we arrived, there was a commotion to the
right front, beyond the road, and a young lieutenant platoon leader ran back across the
road hustling a terrified German soldier in front of him. The lieutenant held a pistol in his
left hand because he had a clean bullet hole through his right wrist. The German's left
arm was limp and his elbow dripped blood.
197
|
 |
|