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Upstarts
The German defense was sporadic by now. There weren't many German troops
left, and most of them were too discouraged to resist, but there were fanatical exceptions,
mostly the super-patriot SS, who preferred to die rather than surrender. One example was
the village I mentioned in the article "Ammunition," defended by the loyal but foolhardy
Hitler Jugend.
We went down the border until we got near the town of Furth im Wald, then
abruptly turned east again, into Czechoslovakia. We were excited by the news that our
Corps objective was Prague. Maybe we could beat the Russians there!
I went with Bob Hughes on reconnaissance. After the recon party had split up due
to their respective tasks, we were sitting in the command car on a country road, looking at
peasants in the adjoining fields. They did not glower and turn away like the German
civilians, but they did not rush up to us either. They looked pretty tentative.
I heard a message coming in on the radio.
Our battalion had a simple little code that we used for normal radio
communications. It was composed of two-letter groups, each of which meant some
commonly used word or phrase, or one letter or number if it was necessary to spell
something out. Anyhow, the message that came in on the command car radio was, "Fox
Roger, Able Tare, Oboe King." The radio operator wrote it down and gave it to Col
Hughes. He looked at it, frowned, and handed it to me. What do you make of this, Bob?"
I took out a ragged copy of the code for the day and examined the message. Fox
Roger was FR. Able Tare was AT. Oboe King was OK. Finally I said, "Whoever sent this
must have been drunk. None of these groups is on today's code."
"Let me see it again," he said.
And then it dawned on both of us at once. It wasn't code; it was only an
abbreviation. FRAT for fraternization, OK for OK.
Two minutes later we were out of the vehicle, leaning over the fence and offering
cigarettes to the loitering farmers. Each of them refused with a wistful smile, but accepted
when the offer was repeated. The ice was broken, and within five more minutes we were
accepting drinks of an amber liquor with an orange flavor.
About this time the 90th Division was halted and put in Corps reserve so we could
accept the surrender of the German 11th Panzer Division, a crack outfit that had opposed
us on several occasions - in between dashing across Germany to fight the Russians. The
915th had no part in this operation, but the 359th Infantry did, and I went over to one of
the release points and watched the process for about a half hour.
I had seen plenty of German PsW before. Sometimes on the way across Germany
I had even seen bypassed groups of enemy soldiers standing along the road trying to flag
down someone who would take time to accept their surrender. One thing all prisoners of
war had in common was their bedraggled, woebegone look. If they had been dogs, they
would have had their tails between their legs.
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