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Chapter 17
The Rhine
As I pulled on my boots, I remembered the scene in the movie Gone With the
Wind in which Scarlett shoots the solitary Yankee soldier who enters her house,
presumably bent on looting or worse. How would a German Hausfrau
react to the
presence of a solitary Yankee soldier violating the sanctity of her home?
I tiptoed down the stairs, hoping that the German conversation would cover any
noise I made. Half a dozen startled faces turned toward me as I entered the kitchen.
I did not pause to parley. Before anyone recovered from the shock sufficiently to
reach for a butcher knife, I charged across the room and out the door, then double-timed
to the main road. There I recovered my breath and watched for a GI vehicle of some kind,
glancing occasionally over my shoulder to make sure no one had followed me.
No one had, and within five minutes a wire truck from some Corps artillery
battalion came by, and from there on it was clear sailing. I don't know what the driver
thought at the sight of an American major standing by the road with his thumb in the air,
but he gave me a lift to his CP, where I hitched a ride to their Group CP, from which I got
transportation to the 90th Div Arty, where I found our message center jeep about to leave
for the 915th. I arrived about dusk, just as they were dispatching a vehicle to go back and
rescue me.
Don Thomson was apologetic. He said that since I generally went on
reconnaissance with Col Hughes, he had assumed I was with him today. When I pointed
out that I had told him where I would be, he mumbled.
There wasn't much time for recriminations anyhow. North of us, in the First Army
zone, the 9th Armored Division had captured a bridge across the Rhine at Remagen and
established a bridgehead. The Third Army was to go into overdrive to catch up.
Consequently, the 359th Regimental Combat Team had been attached to the 4th
Armored Division, which was already swinging south in a sweep to clear the area
between the Moselle and the Rhine. Its first objective was the city of Bad Kreuznach.
When I showed up, Bob Hughes had already started to assemble a command
group basically a stripped-down reconnaissance party - to follow the 359th regimental
command group on the road to catch up with the commander of Combat Command B of
the 4th Armored. [A combat command was a sort of task force made up of whatever
seemed appropriate to its mission. Typically it comprised a tank battalion, an armored
infantry battalion, a field artillery battalion, and smaller units of engineers, medics, etc.
On this occasion, CCB had all this, and the 359th Regimental Combat Team too.]
This was the first time we had worked with an Armored Division, and we had to
make some changes in our basic assumptions. Just for starters, instead of waiting for
orders telling us where to go and what to do when we got there, here we had to get on the
road first, following the armor, and find out where we were going after we got there.
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