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Cease Firing, End of Mission
But this bunch was different. They were dressed in their best uniforms -
I
wasn't
close enough to see if their trousers were creased, but I had the feeling that they were and
the tanks rolled up, one at a time, the tank commanders standing at attention in the
turrets, and stopped at the exact spot where the tank commander handed down the
ammunition, one round at a time, to an American soldier on the ground. The GI passed it
on to another, who put it in a stack to be carried away.
It all went with great precision. The German tankers did not look happy, but they
managed to look proud. I wondered why, but pretty soon it made sense. They were like
the battalion in The Bridge on the River Kwai, who had been ordered to surrender, and
who were still all together as a unit, with their own officers. This Panzer Division had not
been defeated; they had run out of gasoline to maneuver with. (I understand we had to -
send some gasoline to them to enable them to drive in to give themselves up.) And if they
had to surrender, they wanted it to be to us instead of the Russians. They even picked the
90th Division to surrender to: they considered us worthy foes.
Even after they had been disarmed, they were not immediately herded into PW
enclosures - there were far too many of them to manage - but were given assembly areas,
as if they were our own troops, and directed to go there and camp. Their officers kept
their pistols, and one rifle was allowed to each company for guard duty.
A friend of mine was in his jeep when he found himself caught up in a convoy of
trucks from the 11th Panzer Division on the way to their assembly area. They came to an
unexplained halt, as military columns often do, and a German soldier put his head out the
back of the truck and tried to look forward, up the road. "Jesus Christ!" he said in
unaccented American, "They've got it all screwed up again. "
My friend dismounted from his jeep. "Where did you learn English?" he asked.
"In Philly, where I was born and went to school. I came to Germany in 1939 to
visit my grandparents, and I got drafted. Been in the army six years, and it's been this
way all the time - all screwed up!"
This was the grass-roots commentary on one of the crack units in the awesome
German military machine. Come to think about it, it would apply to the 90th Division,
and presumably to the phalanxes of Alexander the Great, Caesar's legions, the hordes of
Genghis Khan, or any military unit of any time.
We never got to Prague, because by the time the 11th Panzer was taken care of,
the whole Third Army was halted in place to await VE Day.
Our battalion position was clustered around two Czech villages. C Battery was
near one, the rest of us closer to another. The villagers were among the most hospitable
people I have known. Bob Hughes and I, as the two senior officers, were invited to stay
in the guest room of a prominent citizen, where we slept on real beds with mattresses and
pillows and goose-down feather beds for covers. In the morning the lady of the house
brought us breakfast in bed, with soft-boiled eggs, toast, and glasses of hot tea with a
half-inch of sugar in the bottom and a shot of the orange liquor to give it flavor. [I
never
heard what they called that liquor, but it tasted like Dutch Curacao.]
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