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The Rhine
There was a catch, however. The bridge carried traffic one way only - forward, or
east. Of course the engineers would have to build a west-bound bridge later, but there
was no assurance it would be done in time for our Paris-bound group to get back and
meet the rendezvous for their anticipated vacation. So they stayed behind, assuring us
that they would catch up with us later.
We went into position within sight of the bridge, and the next day I got to watch
the crossing of the 4th Armored Division. It was a marvelous example of march
discipline. The vehicles, ranging in size from heavy tanks to jeeps, rolled across the
bridge and onto the paved road at precise fifty-yard intervals and proceeded at a uniform
speed and interval until they were out of sight. There were necessary longer gaps between
march units, but aside from that they moved continuously all day. I heard firing in the
distance, so I knew the front of the column must have run into some resistance, but the
tail never even slowed down.
[Note: Years later, at the Armored School, I learned that this phenomenon was
possible because of the doctrine of coiling. When the front of the column was stopped,
the vehicles moved into fields on either side to clear the road for units following.]
The armor raised huge clouds of dust. That was something I never got completely
used to: the pounding given a road by an armored column always raised dust, even if it
had been raining for two weeks and the highway virtually floated on mud. It made no
difference whether the roadway was reinforced concrete, blacktop, gravel, or plain dirt,
by the time the first battalion had gone by, the dust would be billowing up.
In addition to that, after an armored column had passed, the road would be in
urgent need of repair. Concrete would crumble into irregular slabs, blacktop would
dissolve into a series of potholes, gravel and dirt would disintegrate completely. I don't
know how an Autobahn
or freeway would have held up, because I never saw one that our
troops could use for more than a mile or two. All the bridges and overpasses had been
blown.
We moved pretty rapidly after that, and it was more than a week before the Paris
vacationers found us. The three days in Paris had been augmented by travel time. And
Major Doug Myers never got back at all. He had been evacuated, deathly sick. John Klas
was no longer a fill-in; he was our executive officer for the rest of the war.
Lew Fauble gave me the story about Major Myers. Lew was a lean, weather-
beaten man in his mid-twenties. He was rapidly losing his fine blond hair to premature
balding, and he had a malocclusion, his lower jaw protruding forward past the upper.
Nonetheless, he was a warm friend as well as a top-notch officer.
"Doug and I shared a hotel room," he said, "and Doug hardly left it. All the rest of
us were out sightseeing or carousing, drinking and chasing, but it was all wasted on
Doug, because he didn't feel good. He couldn't even hold food down, let alone liquor.
"And then when we were on the way back, on a train headed for Verdun, I took a
good look at him and he was as yellow as a canary bird! Hepatitis, the medics said when
they took him off the train. They said we probably wouldn't see him again this war."
Well, I had heard of combat fatigue, but I never expected Doug Myers to turn
yellow when we crossed the Rhine!
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